Item seven: The loa are frequently religious archetypes. Carry Nation, by her own account, spoke to angels when she was still a child and saw the Holy Ghost at her basement window. She performed two miracles in her life and applied for sainthood, although the application was turned down. Since the DEA agents and I performed only a quasi-Voudon ritual, there is a certain logic to the fact that we got only a quasi-saint in return. The loa I summoned was Carry Amelia Nation. She told me so herself.
Item eight: Ask the General why he left the Vatican embassy.
Harris already knew the answer to item eight. Harris had friends among the attorneys on Miami’s “white powder bar.” It was not that their interests were compatible. It was merely a fact that they saw each other often.
“So what was it?” the attorney told Harris he had asked the General. “Why did you come out? Was it the white room with no windows and no TV? Was it the alcohol deprivation?”
“It was a woman,” the General said.
“You spoke to your mistress.” The attorney knew this much. She had been in U.S. custody at the time. “She persuaded you?”
“No.” The General shuddered violently. His skin turned the color of eggplant. “It was a horrible woman, a huge woman, a woman no man would sleep with.” He was, the attorney told Harris, very possibly a homosexual. Hadn’t he started dressing in yellow jumpsuits? Hadn’t he said that the only people in Panama with balls were the queers and the women? “She sang to me,” the General said.
“Heavy metal?” asked the attorney.
“Who Hath Sorrow, Who Hath Woe,” said the General.
Harris did not include this in his report. It was an off-the-record conversation. And anyway, the DEA would trust it more if they found it themselves.
Harris pushed the key to print. Only the first part of his report fit on the DEA form. He stapled the other pages to it. He signed the report and poured himself a bedtime sherry.
• • •
THE MOORES DID NOT LIVE in Texas very long. Many of their slaves developed typhoid fever while walking there from Missouri. All their horses died. George tried to farm, but he did not know how. Mary told one of their neighbors that she was confiscating his lands and his title, so he threw all their plows into the river. Soon there was nothing to eat.
George called his slaves together. He told them he had decided to free them. The slaves were frightened to be free with no food. Some of them cried.
It was very hard for the Moores to leave their slaves. But Carry said her father had done the right thing. She believed that slavery was a great wrong. She admired John Brown, a man who had fought for the rights of slaves in Kansas and was hanged for it when Carry was thirteen years old. All her life, John Brown was a hero of Carry’s. “When I grow up,” Carry said, “I will be as brave as John Brown.”
Between Texas and Missouri was the Civil War. The Queen’s carriage had been sold. When the Moores went back to Missouri, they had to ride in their little wagon. One day the ground shook behind them. They pulled off the road. It was not an earthquake. It was the Confederate cavalry on their way to the Battle of Pea Ridge. After the cavalry came the foot soldiers. It took two days and two nights for all the soldiers to pass them.
On the third day, they heard cannons. The Moores began to ride again, slowly, in the direction of the cannons. On the fourth day, the Confederate Army passed them again. This time they were going south. This time they were running. The Moores drove their little wagon straight through the smoking battlefield of Pea Ridge.
They spent that night in a farmhouse with a woman and five wounded Union soldiers. The soldiers were too badly hurt to be moved, so the woman had offered to nurse them. She told Carry she had five sons of her own. Her sons were soldiers for the South. Carry helped her clean and tend the boys. One of them was dying. Mary knighted them all.
• • •
“ARE YOU ENJOYING the book?” Harris asked, surprised that she was still awake. He took off his clothes and lay down beside her. She had more than her share of the comforter. He had to lie very close to be warm enough, putting an arm across her stomach, feeling her shift her body to fit him.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “I think she’s wonderful.”
“Wonderful?” Harris removed his arm. “What do you mean, ‘wonderful’?”
“I just mean, what a colorful, amazing life. What a story.”
Harris put his arm back. “Yes,” he agreed.
“And what a vivacious, powerful woman. After all she’d been through. What a resilient, remarkable woman.”
Harris removed his arm. “She’s insane,” he suggested stiffly. “She’s a religious zealot with a hatchet. She’s a joke.”
“She’s a superhero,” said Harris’s wife. “Why doesn’t she have her own movie? Look here.” She flipped through The Girl’s Life to the collection of photographs in the middle. She skipped over Carry kneeling with her Bible in her jail cell to a more confrontational shot: Carry in battle dress, threatening the photographer with hatchetation. “She even had a costume. She designed it herself, like Batman. See? She made special dresses with pockets on the inside for her rocks and ammunition. She could bust up bars and she could sew like the wind. Can Rambo say as much?”
“I bet she threw like a girl,” said Harris, trying for a light tone to mask the fact that he was genuinely upset.
His wife was not masking. “Her aim was supposed to have been extraordinary,” she said in her schoolteacher tone, a tone that invariably suggested disappointment in him. “Women are cut off from the rich mythological tradition you men have. Women are so hungry for heroines. Name one.”
“What?” said Harris.
“Name a historical heroine. Quickly.”
“Joan of Arc,” said Harris.
“Everyone can get that far. Now name another.”
Harris couldn’t think. She tapped her fingers on the page to let him know that time was passing. He had always admired Morgan Fairchild for her political activism, but he assumed this would be the wrong answer. If he hadn’t been so irritated, he could probably have come up with another name.
“Harriet Tubman,” his wife said. “Donaldina Cameron. Edith Cavell. Yvonne Hakime-Rimpel.”
She really was a snob, but she was also a fair-minded woman. She was not, Harris thought, one of those feminists who simply changed history every time it didn’t suit her. Harris got out of bed and went back to the study. His feet were cold on the bare wood floor. Blankets or no blankets, it would take a long time for his feet to warm up. He fished Carry Nation’s autobiography out of his stack and brought it back.
“You haven’t read about her daughter,” he said. “There’s nothing about Charlien in the pretty little version for children that you chose to read.” He flipped through his own book until he found the section he wanted. He thrust it in front of his wife’s face, then pulled it back to read it aloud. “‘About this time, my precious child, born of a drunken father and a distracted mother, seemed to conceive a positive dislike for Christianity. I feared for her soul and I prayed to God to send her some bodily affliction which would make her love and serve Him.’”
Harris skimmed ahead in the book with his finger. “A week later, Charlien developed a raging fever,” he told his wife. “She almost died. And when she recovered from that, part of her cheek rotted away. She had a hole in her face. You could see her teeth. But it was a lucky thing. Because then her jaws locked shut, and she wouldn’t have been able to eat if there wasn’t a hole in her cheek to stick a straw through.” He made an effort to lower his voice. “Her jaws stayed locked for eight years.”