“TIYAH! COME here.”
She and the others were harvesting the cane in our first crop, heavy, back-breaking work. She stood and shielded her eyes, looking over at me. I motioned for her to come closer.
When she stood beside my horse, I looked down at her, utterly composed. “After the day’s work, you will come speak to me at the house, in the study.”
“Yes, Missah,” Tiyah said, betraying no opinion on the matter. She went back to work.
I MADE her wait in the study while I bathed and changed in my room, disgusted by the day’s sweat. I needed all my English armor to deal with her—soap, pomade, and a clean cravat.
I entered the study and ordered Philip bring us cold tea, offering Tiyah a glass as well. Then I dismissed him. I looked at her, trying to find a way to begin.
“I see de bird, he is well,” she said.
I frowned. “Yes.”
“Tis a good ting.” She began to drink from her glass and then drained it in one long draught. She put it on my desk and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “No?”
I stared at her. Her eyes were curious. For a moment, I pictured my hands around her neck. Not a healthy level of aggression, I admit. I cleared my throat and looked away from her. “I want you to remove this… whatever it is you’ve done to me.”
She said nothing.
I looked at her. “I can’t go on this way,” I insisted. “You must take it back.”
She sat forward in her chair, her brow troubled. “Give back a gift from de loa?” She scoffed like she didn’t believe me, like I was playing a prank.
“Yes, damn it! I can’t—” I made myself take a breath. Richard was arriving in a few weeks, and I knew I’d never be able to control myself around him. I couldn’t take this terrible need anymore. I had to finish things here and get back to Elizabeth, and I couldn’t, not with this hunger eating me up. “It’s disturbing my sleep, my mind. I’m engaged to be married, for God’s sake! I don’t want this!”
“I know what tis you want.” Tiyah pinned me with her too-knowing gaze. “You want a man in your bed. But you don want to want it. So you push it deep inside you, swallow it down like poison. But dis who you are, Missah. A frog who try to be a bird—he will end badly, no?”
I was shocked at her words, that she would say it out loud. You want a man in your bed. I was filled with terrible anger made worse by humiliation. I leaned forward on my desk, trying to impress upon her the force of my will.
“I. Saved. Your. Daughter. You take this off me, or I will not be responsible for what I do to you—to the entire village!”
What I meant by the threat, I didn’t know—death and destruction, I suppose. I’d never go through with it, but I was at the end of my rope. I saw disdain flicker across her face before she schooled herself into a cold expression and leaned back in her chair.
She might as well have screamed at me, You’re like all the rest after all. I didn’t care. I hated her, hated myself.
“Maybe I take it away,” she said coldly. “But if you insult Erzulie like so, you never feel passion again, Missah. Not even what you feel before.”
“I don’t care,” I said, straightening my spine.
“So it be. Tomorrow night, I come for you.”
IT WAS like having the same nightmare twice. The drums began, and soon Tiyah stood in my front yard in the dark, dressed all in white and beckoning to me. She led me into the trees with no light to find our way. Her form glowed like a ghost ahead of me.
Only two things were different this time. First, Tiyah had insisted I bring the bird, so I carried the large cage awkwardly at my side. And secondly, I felt less fear of what was to come and more anxiety to simply get it over with.
Erzulie would take my passion from me? I would have none at all?
Good!
I remembered what it had been like before, how the ideas that had skirted around the edges of my brain had been easy to shut out, like a vague itch I could ignore. I remembered how my body had been far less demanding then, so much less… ripe, lush, hungry. I’d been innocent, like a child who doesn’t yet know what it means to be a whore.
Could I get back to that naiveté? And if not to innocence, to numbness at least?
I had to. I had a life waiting for me in English society with Elizabeth, and I refused to be the sort of degenerate who dragged male servants off to dark corners. I refused to be a disgrace.
Yet I wanted so much. And it was addictive to want like that, heady. Once the desire was gone, would I miss it? Or would it be like a man with one leg who learns how to just get on with his life?
The drums—louder and louder—shivered down my spine. The sharp, cloying scent of the smoke filled my nostrils and sank into my brain. Their effect on me was amplified this time, by the heat that already lived under my skin. I struggled to control it and stay true to my purpose.
THE CEREMONY was much like the one before. We arrived at the circle with the center pole. There were fewer people this time, but still enough to fill the clearing. The man who had handled the bird the first time took the cage from me and vanished with it.
Tiyah shook her head, a frown on her face. “I know not if Erzulie come. She not pleased.”
With that, Tiyah moved into the crowd and I was left to my own devices.
What had Tiyah meant by that? Would she refuse to lift this curse from me?
Dancers whirled past me, caught up in the beat of the drums. And now I did feel their looks and their disdain, eyes flashing at me as they went by. Maybe they all knew why I was there, to refuse Erzulie’s gift. Well, I didn’t care. It was not their life being ruined. I would do what I’d come to do. I pushed toward the center pole, wanting to get it over with.
As I moved through the dancers, my heart beat harder and harder. I felt a tingle of dread, and it quickly became a knot of fear, like a fist squeezing my heart.
No passion, ever. Not even what you had before.
Through the beat of the drums, I felt Richard there, like a ghost following right behind me. I even turned to look, the sensation was so strong. But, of course, he wasn’t there.
Except he was. Because what I was doing right now felt like a betrayal of him in a way.
Richard, fifteen years old, leaning forward to kiss me with his soft, dry mouth in my schoolboy’s bed.
He’ll still be my friend. He will always be my friend. We’ll just never have… that.
Never.
But we never would have had it anyway. Even if he did want me like that, it’s not something I ever would have allowed myself to acknowledge. So what difference did it make?
I stood in front of the pole, and Tiyah was there, waiting. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, showing only the whites, and she stood rigid, staring at me. In her hands was a knife.
For a moment I thought she meant me harm, that in refusing her gift, I’d angered her to the point of murder. But she only thrust the knife forward, handle first, urging me to take it.
“Tuer il. Tuer l’oiseau. Et tuer votre désir à jamais!”
Kill it. Kill the bird. And kill your desire forever!
The man holding the cage opened it and brought out the bird. Oh, the bird! It had become as familiar to me as my own face in the glass—exotic and horrible and familiar all in one. It did not try to fly away but sat hunched with its black feet curled around the man’s fingers. Its red eyes were fixed on mine. It opened its beak in a plea but made no sound. It sat there, chest moving with its rapid breath, waiting.
The knife was in my hand. My palm was slick with sweat against the wooden handle. The man held the bird away from his body, offering it up to my blade. One strike in the breast and it would be done.
Richard. The name echoed around and around through my skull, as if part of me were panicking, wings beating against the walls of my mind. Richard.
I saw his eyes sparkling in the sun, his slim, pale chest when we went swimming in the river, his broad mouth laughing. I saw him lying on his side in my bed at school, so young, only fifteen, his eyes staring into mine full of love and hope and fear.
I saw Elizabeth’s face, young and polite and good, her hand perfectly poised as she sipped a cup of tea in the parlor.
The knife fell from my hand to the ground. I reached forward and grasped the bird on either side of its wings, lifted it up, and tossed it into the air.
With a loud caw, it flew away.