54

“YEYETTE! YEYETTE! Wake up, Yeyette!”

It was Euphemia, her voice cracked and hoarse, her urgent shouting triggering a spasm of coughing.

I sat up in bed. It was still dark, but the birds had begun a sleepy chirping outside my window.

“What is it? Is it Hortense? Is it one of the children?”

Still coughing, Euphemia shook her head. “Put on your dressing gown. Come quickly,” she gasped. She went to my wardrobe and brought out a gown, moving with surprising agility for her seventy-odd years. She handed the garment to me and helped me wrap it around my waist. Then she led me downstairs and out into the courtyard where a wagon was waiting.

“Tell me where we are going!” I demanded after Euphemia had fairly pushed me up and into the wagon and made me sit down on the rough bench behind the driver.

“You will see. He has come. The great one has come.”

It was all she would say, as the wagon rattled along, headed in the direction of the cottages around the lake where Euphemia lived. I saw that she was tense and pale, but also full of a strange excitement. I had never seen her in this state before.

Dawn was breaking as we reached the lake, and I saw at once, through the morning mist, that a tent had been erected beside the water. As we came closer I made out the figure of a very old, very dark man with red feathers in his straggling grey hair and wearing a dirty red cloak. He was seated on a tree stump. Around him were three African men in loincloths but with ragged jackets covering their chests and arms. It was Orgulon.

The wagon stopped and I got down, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. The ancient quimboiseur, who had looked as old as time itself when I saw him in my girlhood, now appeared almost skeletal, with little flesh on his bony legs and a skull-like face. His skin was greyish-black, his withered hands bent, the fingers curled under, like the claws of a chicken. Yet when I approached him, and he turned his wrinkled face toward me, I saw that the look he gave me with his one good eye was still powerful, and I shivered slightly under his gaze.

A fire had been lit in one corner of the tent, and there was a strong odor of incense in the air. A drift of smoke reached me as I knelt down on the damp grass beside the old man.

He fixed me with his one-eyed gaze. Presently he spoke, his voice faint and raspy.

“The time has come,” he said. “The fer-de-lance will strike. You must kill it.”

“How?”

“Frighten it. Then kill it. And the demon that sent it.”

“How will I know the demon?”

“You married him. Now you must destroy him.”

I cannot describe the feelings the old quimboiseur’s words evoked in me, a shattering, numbing blend of awe, dread, and a curious exaltation.

Once long ago Orgulon had saved my life, and told me I was being spared for a purpose. Now he had come all the way from Martinique, an arduous journey of many months, to announce to me that my purpose was at hand.

I did not doubt his oracular words.

“His way lies eastward. Follow him. I will send you a light to see by.”

He sighed then, and his head slumped forward on his chest. The men who stood by, in attendance on him, gently eased him onto a mat and drew a blanket over his shrunken body.

I did not linger, but returned to the house along with a trembling Euphemia.

“He spoke to you. He knew you.”

“He remembered me from all those years ago, when I went up Morne Gantheaume in search of him.”

“You were lucky he didn’t shrivel up your heart in your body.”

“Of course not. He believes I have something important to do. He wants me to live so that I can carry out my important task.”

“What task?”

I looked at Euphemia. Her eyes were wide with fear and uncertainty. “To kill the fer-de-lance.”

Orgulon lived just long enough to deliver his message to me. When Euphemia and I returned to the lakeside cottages later that afternoon, his attendants were wrapping his body in strips of bark tied with red cloth.

“Where will they bury him?” I asked Euphemia.

“The grave of a quimboiseur is always hidden. The body dies, but the spirit walks at night. It goes in search of the gods of the underworld— and finds them at the sacred crossroads, the place where the living meet the dead.”

“But that was on Martinique, far away.”

Euphemia shook her head. “There are many sacred crossroads in this world, wherever the gods are revered.”

As we stood by, Orgulon’s attendants completed their task. Leaving their tent in place and their fire burning, they hoisted the old man’s body on their shoulders and noiselessly walked off into the forest, oblivious of us and of the cottagers who had come out onto the grass to watch what was happening.

“Good Josephine,” one of the cottagers called out to me, “who were those men? What were they doing here?”

“Old friends of mine from Martinique,” I told them, leaving them unsatisfied but reluctant, since I was their social superior and benefactor, to ask more questions.

It was dusk, the blue hour. A cool wind stirred the leaves in the trees around the lake, and I pulled my shawl more tightly around my shoulders.

Suddenly the darkening sky seemed to grow lighter. A curious radiance flooded from the western horizon, then gathered itself, moment by moment, into a glowing ball with a long trailing tail, all agleam.

I had never seen anything like it. Gradually, as we watched, night fell, but along with the stars there glowed in the sky this radiant bright orb with its shining train.

“I will send you a light to see by,” Orgulon had told me, and here it was, light abundant, his gift and his legacy. I stood in awe, wondering at the light, hoping it would not fade, seeing in it a sign that I could indeed carry out the task Orgulon had given me. I stood for a long time, until Euphemia tugged at my sleeve and insisted that we leave, reminding me that I had had no supper and that she, for one, was getting cold.

I let her lead me back to the house, our way lit by the glow above us. Orgulon’s light. I shone within, exulting in all that I had seen and heard that day, sure that my life had taken a new and wondrous turning.