The Temple of My Familiar Read online

  "Remember what I told you about losing my foot and leg after being caught in a bear trap?"

  "Oh," said Suwelo, his eyes going instantly to the picture of the small, sad-eyed, very black cripple. It wasn't that you could see her injury--the missing foot and leg--it was just that you looked into the ashen face, in which the spirit seemed already to have been given up, and you knew.

  "Now this," said Miss Lissie, seeing in Suwelo's mournful face the heaviness of his commiseration with a self she had moved through, "is how I looked at the time when I stayed with the cousins and hung out in their trees." She handed Suwelo the happiest-looking of all the pictures, in which she appeared squat, tiny, with a waist like a wasp's, her hair in wooly ringlets, her eyes bright and laughing, her strong white teeth playfully bared in a wide smile. A pygmy.

  SO THAT IS WHY they believed Africans ate people, Suwelo mused, thinking of what Miss Lissie had told him, on the visit previous to the last, about the cousins. Someone, millennia after the time of which she spoke, had come across the gnawed skulls and bones of these ill-fated relatives. But then, obviously in Miss Lissie's estimation, her cousins were people, even more peoplelike than the folks from her own branch of the family. He sat looking at the picture of Miss Lissie from thousands of years ago; he imagined her mate taking the photograph and laughing with her as she made faces at him. He imagined their children crawling about under the cathedrallike trees; trees as big as Chartres, she had said. He imagined the huge black hairy cousins swinging about with their young and Miss Lissie's young, too, clinging to their backs. He thought of the big dark faces and the small paler ones.

  He was still thinking of this when he heard Mr. Hal's truck and, later, his gentle, tentative knock on the door. Suwelo let him in, helped him off with his coat, and because he knew how Mr. Hal enjoyed good coffee, he hastened to make him a cup.

  Suwelo had now been in Uncle Rafe's house for more than two months. He had not forgotten Fanny and California--and there was a "For Sale" sign outside on the tiny lawn--but days went by when he did not think of her. Or if he did think of her, it was to feel sad that she could not share what he was experiencing. Fanny loved old people and was conversant with them in ways he was not. He was much more likely to be embarrassed with them, as if he suspected they sensed the impatience that was frequently his frame of mind. But it wasn't simply impatience with them that he felt; he was impatient with the situation that young and old these days had inherited (and he forgot a lot of the time that he was getting older himself): that of being without sufficient time either to talk, really talk, to each other or to listen. Say you were at some unusual event, some kind of house party, and you found yourself next to an ancient anthropologist who just casually said: "Well, when I was in Afghanistan in the thirties ... blah, blah, blah." What did you do? What you wanted to do was grab her by her collar and drag her home and sit her down in a big comfy chair and sit at her feet (or his feet, as the case might be) for a week, while she talked. At the party the most you were likely to get was a sly anecdote about travel by camel and the lack of roads. It was maddening.

  Fanny was more likely than he to stay glued to some rare old person for an evening, completely absorbed, though both she and the old person had to strain to hear each other over the noise of the other guests.

  Suwelo loved what was happening to him and was grateful for the time his uncle Rafe had provided for him to get to know his house, his friends, a life he could not have learned about any other way than by having it subsidized. He remembered the first time he had waited for Miss Lissie and her friend, Miss Rose, to bring his lunch and he had asked them to please step inside. Miss Rose had declined, hurriedly, saying she had grandchildren at home waiting for her, but Miss Lissie had come in as if she had been expecting the invitation, and had stood in the foyer in a rather queenly way, he thought, as if waiting for him to dispose of some earlier guest. They looked at each other for a long moment. That day it was her dignity he noticed first; the straightness of her posture. Next, her reserve, the way she said "How do you do?" so formally, then nothing else, as he stood beside her, waiting for her to take the first step into the living room, where, he reasoned, she must have sat countless times before. But she did not budge. He thought she looked quite stately, for someone who wasn't very tall. And then he, too, became conscious of the guests in his living room.

  "I'm sorry. Excuse me," he said hurriedly, and walking quickly into the living room, he snapped off the TV.

  "I get used to having it on for company," he said, by way of apology. And then he thought, she probably watches the soaps herself, so he said, "I'm getting more like my cousins and aunts every day; they all watch the soaps."

  "The whats?" asked Miss Lissie.

  "You know, the stories on TV," said Suwelo, thinking the modern shorthand for TV stories confused her. After all, she was very old. "Which do you watch?"

  "I don't watch TV," she said, sitting in a chair next to it and at the same time drawing a blue fringed shawl that had lain on top of the set since Suwelo arrived completely over the front of it.

  So that's its purpose, Suwelo thought, for he had looked at the blue shawl, a large, vivid Mexican serape, and felt it made a rather peculiar doily.

  Today Mr. Hal sat in the same chair Miss Lissie usually chose, right by the TV, and like Miss Lissie he paid more than cursory attention to the position of the shawl. Suwelo watched TV much less himself now that Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal talked to him, or, as he sometimes thought of it, transmitted to him, in much the same way the TV did. He was in the habit of covering it whenever it was off. Mr. Hal contented himself with tugging at a corner of the shawl and straightening the edge. That small ritual completed, a gesture that seemed unconsciously designed to close off completely an erroneous and trivial point of view, Mr. Hal settled back to take up his narrative where he had left off. For Suwelo's talks with him and Miss Lissie were not conversations. They were more correctly perceived as deliveries. Suwelo was grateful to receive.

  "You don't know, or maybe you do," said Mr. Hal, a look of deep satisfaction with the coffee and with his thoughts on his face, "how wonderful a feeling it give you when you know somebody love you and that's just the way it is. You can be good, you can be a devil, and still that somebody love you. You can be weak, you can be strong. You can know a heap or nearly nothing. That kind of love, when you think about it, just seems like some kind of puzzle, and you can spend a lifetime trying to figure it out. If you puffed up with vanity, you can't help but think what they love is something you created yourself. Or maybe it's your money or your car. But there's something... . It's like how you love a certain place. You just do, that's all. And if you're lucky, while you're on this earth, you get to visit it. And the place 'knows' about your love, you feel. That was the love and still is the love between Lissie and me."

  Mr. Hal settled himself more comfortably in his chair, took a large slurping sip of his coffee, just as Uncle Rafe and every old Southern gentleman Suwelo had ever met had done, and continued.

  "So the white folks wanted all us boys, your uncle Rafe, too, for the army, to fight in the Great War, or so they said. The truth was, they wanted us to be servants for the white men who fought. I wasn't painting worth nothing then--did I tell you I used mostly house paint?--Lissie wasn't pushing me, for some reason, and I couldn't hardly see the road in front of me. But I was black and able-bodied, and the white folks wanted me for fodder in their war. The furthest I had been from the Island was about a mile from shore. They wanted us to fight some people none of us had heard of, and they were white folks, too. Well, not to fight 'em, just to serve our own white masters, you might say, while they fought 'em.

  "So anyway, it meant leaving the Island, leaving my family, and leaving Lissie. I didn't see how I could stand it. Lissie couldn't either, but Lissie couldn't fight the white man's army, though I don't doubt she would've tried. She hated white people anyway and said she didn't have one good memory from a thousand years of dealing wit
h them. But you know from all the stuff Lissie's told me, she didn't have many real good memories of anybody. She was just in a rage most of the time about me going away. And out of that rage, she got the notion we should be married. I was scared to say no. Besides, it was what everybody was doing, getting married, and it's safe to say to you today that we didn't have a clue, really and truly, about what marriage was. Plus I loved Lissie--when hadn't I loved Lissie?--and she loved me so much, too much, till sometimes I was almost smothered.

  "They used to speak of that time on the Island as the time of the big rash. They meant the rash of folks getting married. Like most of them, we got married on the front porch at Lissie's people's house, looking out over the bay. It was a pretty spring day, and I just itched to paint it. I never will forget we had a woman preacher to marry us, because we had two preachers on the Island, both of them called by the spirit, and we were too out of the way things were done in the rest of the world to know the spirit didn't call women. Then there was Lissie staring everybody down and saying she remembered that women were called first and this calling was something men then took away from them. Well, nobody was going to fight Lissie over something nobody thought was important. We had two spirit-called people, a woman and a man. It seemed right. Like you have two different kinds of parents, a woman and a man, you know. It wasn't until I was in the army and saw how all the preachers, priests, and chaplains everywhere we went--and we got as far as France--were men that I thought about what Lissie had said, and how disgusted she looked when she said it. Of course at different times Lissie herself was a witch doctor and a sorceress and a preacher of various kinds, so she knew what she was talking about. She was so angry. The maddest human being I've ever seen in all my years of living. Because she saw people losing ground in the battle against ignorance and she could see how it would turn out, whatever the battle was, because she had seen it all before.

  "So really, I don't know why she thought marriage was the answer for us. But I went along with her and hoped for the best. Here was a woman I loved, who loved me and let me paint--she thought nothing of spending a morning thinning enough house paint for me to use up in an hour, and she was a regular scavenger for cardboard and likely pieces of wood, since I painted on any and everything--and she encouraged it--sometimes even, what you might say, forced me to do it, and I couldn't give her up. For her part, I think she wanted to make the bond between us clearer to other people--we didn't need it to be clearer to ourselves--and you know how it is: trying to make a private bond a public one is like trying to turn water to wine when you prefer water to wine, and anyway you ain't Christ.

  "But what did we know? There we were together in bed that night after the wedding. I was dead tired and I was leaving in the morning. Lissie was even tireder than I was, since she'd been out in the boat fishing early that morning; that's what we had to eat at our wedding, fried fish. But somehow we thought we had to have at each other, as they say. It was a pretty fumbly minute or two, and nothing much was done, or so I thought. We cried and kissed each other a few million times and whispered all our little failings and hopes and secrets to each other, and then, lying like little children in each other's arms--I suspect Lissie still sucks her thumb--we drifted off to sleep. The next morning I left.

  "Well, I really couldn't see that well, not even well enough to make a decent stable boy, and pretty soon I was shipped back home. Lissie and her mother had opened up a little store on the Island in part of the front porch of their house. They sold produce out of their garden and things--kerosene, matches, bluing, baking soda--her mother brought back from the mainland in her boat. They also sold fresh fish. I remember that because, when I moved back into Lissie's little room, everything there used to smell of fish.

  "Lissie was pregnant, with a passion for lemons and salt. Every time you saw her she had half a lemon sprinkled with salt stuck in her mouth. She was healthy and strong--she did the fishing in her mother's boat--and I was soon healthy and strong with her, because fishing and crabbing became something I did, too, and did well. And with Lissie urging me on, I was also painting again, with the sun in my eyes, healing them, and the moisture from the bay. The little paintings I did, Lissie hung up in the store, and sometimes people right there on the Island just fell in love with a painting and would put it on layaway, but also white people from the mainland, who stopped by for a cold drink, bought them. I sold them for a dollar apiece, or sometimes for less than a dollar; barely enough to cover the paint. But still, it made me happy to know somebody besides me and Lissie liked what I did.

  "We had both acquired a bit more knowledge by then, and our love was always strong, so we just let ourselves be free. She was already pregnant, so that wasn't something to worry about, and well, we were just all the time fucking. If you pardon the expression. I think Lissie was happy then. I know I was. I used to love looking at her as she ran about here and there. She was like a leaf leaving a tree on wind, always in motion, quick as light. And smart. Pretty soon she'd moved us out of her mother's house to a place of our own, and it was in our own house that our passion for each other reached a peak, and then sort of made itself a plateau. That kind of love, with the--what do you all call it these days?--the sex, is nothing like what you see on TV or in the picture show. It doesn't even seem like such a big thing at the time. It's just something real good, tasty, you know? It's something very much like food. Or sleep. We'd fuck and sleep and eat and fish, and I'd paint and she'd do her work, and the sun would shine or it would rain, and the catch would be good or the fish would all have gone to visit some other part of the bay. There was no seam. It was whole cloth. So that eating a piece of bread that really rocked the taste buds made me think of fucking Lissie. Or her fucking me; God knows she could. Drinking cool water on the boat in the sun sent us to our knees. Lissie was always laughing. At her clumsiness, her heavy breasts that I loved so much to suck, her cushy butt, her belly that loomed over my head like a melon when I made love to her little ... kitten, let us say. Or the way we said it then, when I 'twirled her on my tongue.' I loved to have her like that in the boat. If the bay was calm, and sometimes it was like glass, we forgot about fishing, and she would stand big and naked, balanced in the boat, and spread her legs just enough. Oh.

  "When we made love we never thought of anybody or anything else. I never did, anyway. Just as when I drank a glass of water I didn't shift my mind to some other glass of water that I tried to pretend I was also drinking. This way of loving just exactly who you're with seems totally out of reach of half the people making love in the world today. And I think it's a shame.

  "But it all ended anyway, Suwelo. That part of life. It ended because our daughter, Lulu, was born. And it wasn't her fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, maybe. I try to tell myself it had to end, that time when everything was pure cool water to my thirst, good bread to my hunger. That time when, really, Lissie and I were in danger of getting lost in each other and to ourselves. Because when I was with Lissie I didn't care if neither of us was ever heard from again.

  "I remember once a photographer, the first one ever seen on the Island, came over to buy a chair from my father, and seeing Lissie, asked to take a picture of her standing beside the chair. We were just fascinated by the thought of picture taking, of which we had heard, though we had never seen a live picture taker before, and he was a colored man! We tiptoed about his tripod and knocked a couple of times on the big black box that the man said made the picture, but our true feeling was, we didn't want to be bothered; that the new picture-taking science was just fine and dandy, but we had better things to do, like lay up. I'm pretty sure we were drenched in the smell of fucking. That smell some couples have, or used to have. Now it's all covered over with perfume. But Lissie used to smell loud, and I loved it. But not when other men noticed it and started to sniff around her. Like that picture taker. 'You married?' he asked her. There I was, there my daddy and mama was, there was Lissie so pregnant she could only see one foot at a time. 'You married?' ask
ed that dog.

  "Lulu was born on a night of such stillness it made us think the whole world was holding its breath. Both Lissie and I were looking forward to the birth. We had made up a little crib next to our bed and everything. Neither one of us knew that disaster was about to strike our love life, and that between the first labor pain and the disposal of the afterbirth I would be a changed man. But even if we had of known, what could we have done? I've asked myself that question a million times. But fate had us in its teeth.

  "In those days pregnant women like Lissie didn't go to the doctor just because they were pregnant. It would have been like going to the hospital because you started to get breasts. It was a natural something that happened to women, and a good woman, meaning a sensible one, always had a granny to help her see after herself. Lissie actually had two. She had her mother, Eula--Eula Mae--and the woman Lissie was most like in the world, Dorcy--Dorcy Hogshead--her grandmother. Dorcy was a devil. The most contentious, cantankerous old witch that ever lived. However, a genius at delivering babies. Her people always claimed that Lissie took after her and that that was the reason she was so mean. They never believed in Lissie's memory, you see. I never understood how they could not believe in it myself. Lissie remembered and reported on stuff nobody'd ever heard of, stuff nobody ever could have told her. Stuff she'd never read because it wasn't in the books she had. But then that left dreaming. So her folks said she dreamed instead of remembered, and the stuff she didn't dream, she got from Granny Dorcy.

  "So Granny Dorcy had been checking Lissie right along. And she remembered a lot, too, and it gave her a lot of power, just like it did Lissie, but she didn't have Lissie's kind of faith in herself, so she would content herself with the belief that she could interpret her own and other people's dreams. But really what she was doing was putting together the past in some kind of pattern so that it could be understood in the present. I think she was probably scared shitless by her gift. So many people are. She was an old woman that looked like she could have remembered seeing the warships that passed the Island on the way to firing the first rockets against Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War, which she said she did. She looked a lot like Sojourner Truth--you know that picture you sometimes see of her with her bonnet and her long dress and her shawl and her white clay pipe. Granny smoked a pipe and sometimes, some people said, she would blow smoke on her babies to get them to sneeze and come alive. I know she used to say that, mean as people said she was, she'd never hit one of the little ones she brought into the world, and you know slapping a newborn baby was and is something that's just automatically done. Granny Dorcy thought it was barbaric.