Despite Mama’s reassuring presence from time to time, loneliness was a terrible plague after her death. Those weekly visits had sustained me, allowed me to see Luna through her eyes, watch her with her children, watch her laugh, cry and live. I saw her age, and instead of stealing her beauty along with her youth, she grew more beautiful as time wrote a tale of love across her features. With Mama’s death, it felt as if I had lost Luna all over again, and with each year that passed, my fears increased as I watched time rush toward the day when it would take her away from me.
I only saw glimpses of her over those years, usually through the eyes of strangers, or people she bought from and the few neighbours she spoke with. Her first child, Lina, had returned to Mississippi years before and the two were rarely apart, especially after Mama’s death.
When Jupiter died, I considered going to her, but I knew I would not be able to resist taking her with me, and then the inevitable would happen. I only had to picture Mama’s broken body when I found her in the chapel to keep my distance from Luna.
It was a blow when on one dreary, winter’s morning, I dreamt of a grave by Luna’s home. I already knew who sent me that dream and what it meant.
I awoke immediately. It was midmorning. Not wanting to believe it, I dressed and left to make my way to Luna’s home.
It was true. She died during the night and they were burying her that morning as had been her final wish. I hovered in the woods, as people gathered near the house for the funeral, and listened, still hoping against hope that there was some kind of mistake.
The first person I heard was Ebenezer.
Crazy. They all are.
He was looking at Lina, who stood at the grave. Her back was straight, her lips pursed as she stared, almost contemptuously as they began shovelling earth in the grave. Curiously, she was the only one who wasn’t dressed in black. She was, instead, wearing a sunburst yellow dress and coat that got more than a few stares of disapproval along with a couple of tsks and head shaking from those who were brave enough.
Curious as to what Ebenezer meant, I searched his mind to the event that had occurred just a few hours ago.
Lina was walking through the house in a rage, taking the sheets Ebenezer had placed over the mirrors off again.
“What the hell is you doing, woman? You want a haint to come in this here house?” he said, referring to the Negro superstition regarding the spirits of the dead and the custom of placing sheets over mirrors so they wouldn’t have a way to come back into the world of the living.
She stopped long enough to glare at him.
“If my mama wants to come back, she’ll just walk right on in through the front door. Ain’t no sheets over mirrors is gonna stop her.” She pushed past him onto the next room, leaving Ebenezer to enter and place the sheets back over the mirrors.
Standing by the graveside, his expression softened as he stared at her. But God, I loves her. A soft sigh escaped him, his grief cutting into him again. Along with her crazy mama and grandmama.
My attention was taken away from him when Lina abruptly turned around and stared at the woods, her gaze hard. She was curiously dry-eyed, unlike most of the other mourners. She couldn’t possibly see me from that distance, but she definitely knew I was there. I slunk away, and it felt as if her gaze was still on me long after I left.
I returned to the house at night when I was sure they would all be asleep. I knelt at the grave, finally giving way to my grief and rivers of it poured forth from me. The harsh reality of her death was like a whirlwind of hurt I could barely see through.
She was dead, gone. I stayed there for about an hour until I heard stirrings within the house, in one of the bedrooms, Lina and Ebenezer’s.
I retreated into the shadow of the large tree where I was sure I wouldn’t be seen and stared up at the house. A few moments later, Lina appeared at the bedroom window and opened it. She wore a white cotton night dress and her thick wavy hair hung in two braided ropes. She didn’t need to see me to know I was there, she had probably been aware of my presence from the moment I got there. She stared at me long and hard, still so very angry. I didn’t need to delve into her mind to discover this, she wanted me to know it.
She’s betrayed me. She kept repeating it over and over again.
Confused, my heart went out to her and I moved out of the deep dark provided by the tree and into the moonlight.
She is dead, Lina. That is not a betrayal.
She merely snorted, though I saw tears glistening in her eyes before she threw something out of the window. She closed the window and then I heard her get back into bed. But she remained wide awake, her heart in turmoil and her thoughts churning endlessly.
I moved to the small object she threw out of the window. It was a small leather-bound journal. I opened it and the first words were like a lance, the pain of Luna’s death deepening.
My name is Luna and my tale begins on a dry summer evening in 1807.
I closed it and placed it in my pocket. With one last look at Luna’s grave, I left. Lina didn’t want me there. And all that lay there was Luna’s corpse, she was gone.
I spent the rest of the night by the lake. It was so still and peaceful, a direct contrast to the roiling river of pain and despair rocking me.
I remained there even when it began to snow and a soft blanket of snowfall painted the landscape white. I didn’t want to go back to the mansion where the memories of her would surely kill me, but at dawn, I stood up to go and found myself standing at the chapel door. I spun round to see Mama Akosua standing in the middle of the clearing watching me.
Usually I saw Mama in dreams and she was always a faint, gossamer echo of the woman I had known in life. But on this occasion, she was almost completely solid, the strongest she had ever appeared to me since her death. I walked toward my old friend. The fact that she should appear now in my darkest hour was some comfort to me.
“Mama?”
She gazed at me carefully and there was something weary about her stance.
“I have fulfilled my promise to you, but she is still angry. You have to remember that and tend her anger like you would tend seeds, otherwise it will rise up and strangle the good you have sown.”
“Mama, I do not understand.”
“Go home, Wɔfa Avery.” She placed a hand on my cheek and a small tired smile touched her lips briefly. It was quickly replaced by apprehension. “Be careful.”
She was gone and I was standing alone at the foot of the lake. Confused, and with a strong sense of foreboding, I ran back to the mansion.
The heartbeat was the first thing that filled my ears when I materialised out of the ether some distance from the mansion. Amidst a sea of snow was a small figure standing before the mansion. I had to look carefully over every inch of the figure. First the slim brown legs in battered men’s boots. Up at the slender body in a faded blue dress that was too small and the grey blanket that was wrapped around her. She looked incredibly forlorn and vulnerable as she shivered against the cold. At last I gazed at the face peeping over the blanket she held up to her neck.
I was looking at Luna’s face, the young, fresh face I had seen during those years in the wilderness, and the one I saw for the very first time when she wandered out of the chapel to the stream all those years ago. There were tears in her eyes and a wistful half smile as she gazed at me.
I found I could not move. I was scared to move, to do or say anything that would break the spell and render me out of whatever dream I was clearly in.
She reached out a trembling hand and took a shaky step forward, and before I realised I had moved, I was standing before her, reaching out to clasp the proffered hand even though I still believed it must be some kind of trick or illusion.
“Luna? Is it really you?”
“Yes,” she whispered reaching up to touch my face as if in disbelief, tears falling onto her cheeks. “Yes, Avery.”
I gathered her small, trembling body to mine. That was when I realised with a jolt that the years of despair were at an end.
She had returned to me.
And in my exhilaration, Mama and her warning were completely lost to me. But the seed of what would eventually destroy us were there even then.
She was so beautiful, her raven eyes shining with unshed tears and the pain of those forty years of separation from me.
“I thought I’s gonna die without ever seeing you again,” she said, her voice trembling with intense emotion. “But I still ain’t give up on you. You has to promise that you ain’t never gonna leave me again. You has to promise, Avery, ‘cause I ain’t gonna let you do that to me a second time.”
“Nothing will ever keep us apart again,” I promised.
There was a clear threat behind Luna’s words that morning, but I mistook it for passion. And I continued to be blind to the little manifestations of it over the years, and just as Mama had warned, the seed grew until eventually it overran our little garden of love.