“No, ma’am. The last I heard from her she was in Korea. But she said that if I ever came to Oakland, I should look up her grandma and granddad,” the tall woman said.
Renee Ferris looked unaware into her cousin’s face and said, “My auntie, Mrs. Charm, died six months ago.”
Nesta couldn’t keep the tears out of her eyes. “What happened?”
“She was just old, child,” the cousin said. She put out her hand and touched the dark-skinned girl’s forearm. “Why don’t you come in for a while and rest.”
The house seemed smaller but smelled the same. Nesta walked in past the staircase, into the living room, where her grandfather sat in his pitted chrome wheelchair. He was looking out the window at the hummingbird feeder on the back porch.
Nesta saw the pair of green hummingbirds taking turns at the honey water spout. She knew their approximate weight in milligrams and the rate of speed at which their wings fluttered. But all she cared about was her grandfather’s eyes on them.
“Uncle,” Renee Ferris said. “This here is one of Nesta’s friends — Ebony.”
Lythe Charm had been an old man as far back as Nesta could remember. But his face was always like a child’s, inquisitive and ready to laugh. Now even his eyes were old and sad. Nesta thought of a senior citizens home she worked in for a few weeks outside of Boulder, Colorado. She worked there while attending a series of lectures on Shakespeare that were being given at the university.
The lectures were nothing compared to watching, hearing, and smelling the ever encroaching specter of death among the aged.
She’d sat one evening with an old woman dying from collapsing veins. Nesta was telling her a story that she’d heard in Selma, Alabama. A story about an Indian down there who, centuries before, had first brought snakes to the territory. It was a wild tale of stealth and intrigue, but in the end everything worked out all right. The snake found his hole near a cultivated field, and all the deer and rabbits steered clear from then on.
Somewhere during the story the old woman died. Nesta felt it like a sudden vacuum in the room. Somewhere things felt empty, and Nesta realized how much space the human soul inhabited.
She could feel the sadness in her grandfather’s soul.
“Hello, Mr. Charm,” Nesta said.
“You know my baby?” he asked, looking hard at the tall and beautiful woman.
“We traveled together around a whole lot of the world,” Nesta said. “I got to know her pretty well.”
“Where is she now?”
“In Korea,” Nesta lied, and then sat down on the corner of the sofa nearest her grandfather. “She told me a lot about you.”
“Oh?” The old man smiled. “What she say?”
“She talked about how much you liked blackberry tea—”
“I sure do.”
“— and about how when you were younger you drove two hundred and forty-six cattle across Texas on horseback and how you didn’t lose one of them.”
“She remembered that, huh?”
“She told me all about you, Mr. Charm. She told me a story to tell you when we saw each other. A story that she heard in Alabama.”
Lythe Charm smiled with broad anticipation, “And what story was that?”
“Excuse me, Ebony,” Renee said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is that little bag your suitcase?” She was referring to the beat-up leather bag, the size of a school satchel, that the young woman carried with her.
“Yes, ma’am. I just got into town. I was going to find a Y to stay at, but I wanted to drop by here and say hello first.”
“Well, you take that bag upstairs and put it in the third room on the right. That’s Nesta’s room. You put it down up there and clean up, and I’ll make us all some supper.”
“But I wanna hear Nesta’s story she sent me,” Lythe Charm complained.
“Don’t worry, Uncle,” said the dutiful and dour Renee Ferris. “Ebony’ll spend the night and tell us everything about your girl.”
“Was it a planet?” Lythe Charm asked the young woman who called herself Ebony.
“No, no, that’s not what they called it,” she answered. “It was more like a giant stone that was once alive but then became the home to its own children.”
“Like a shell,” he said.
“Yes.”
The black woman’s smile was brilliant and white. She had been telling Lythe Charm a story that she said she’d learned from his granddaughter who had, in turn, learned it from a little-known tribe of American Indians called the ArShoni. The story Nesta was telling was a fragment of the creation story that she had inherited from the blue light that infused her with knowledge and power.
“... for more years than man can count,” Nesta continued, “bright forms of life that were like animals and flowers and insects and fish all in one grew out of the ground and bathed in the light of a rainbow-colored star—”
“Were they on a planet then or was that on the big rock?” Lythe Charm asked, hungry for the words of his long-gone granddaughter.
“That was on the planet, before things changed,” Nesta said. “The life-forms grew and intermingled and multiplied and changed. Because on this planet the fish and beasts could speak and mate; all life there was equal and respectful.”
“What did they eat?” the old man asked slyly. “If they all respected each other, even the flowers and the trees, then what could they eat?”
“They lived on the light from the rainbow star,” the young woman said. “The radiant energy of the star fed them. And for eons they grew and multiplied and changed. After many millions of years they began to fly and grow higher and higher until some had completely left the planet and flew closer and closer to the sun, looking for more and more energy because the great joy among these far-off folk was to bathe in the light of the sun and to grow.
“These great flying beasts had within them chambers of quartz that stored light in patterns that held all of the wisdom of all the life-forms that were once planet-bound. Then they began to multiply by placing the seed of their physical being on lifeless chunks of matter in space and then bathing those seeds with the light from within their deep quartz caverns.”
“And why was that?” Lythe Charm asked. He was feeling younger and stronger just talking to the strange-looking woman. There was something about her that was familiar, but Lythe couldn’t seem to put his finger on it. “Why would they have to shine light on their own seeds if there was a sun still shining?”
“Because their light contained memories and instructions on how to grow. The seeds had the power of life, but in the light was their souls’ purpose.”
“Kinda like Sunday school in a flashlight, huh?” Lythe asked.
“A little bit. But as time went by, the space creatures got larger and larger. Soon they were as big as moons and there were millions of them. They absorbed all the energy of the star and then floated out toward new stars. By then they were as large as planets. Their hard external shells covered mighty engines that they had for both their heart and brain. Millions of years passed, and the planets of life spread out across the universe. And as they moved, now and again, they would deposit their seed on likely-looking planets. Emanating—”
“Say what?” Lythe Charm, whose eyes were looking younger, asked.
“Emanating. That means ‘coming out from.’ ”
“Oh, yeah. Uh-huh, I see.”
“Anyway, emanating from the seed was a soft music, and if another of their celestial brethren would pass by, they would hear it and shine their light where the seed had fallen. That way, information and life could pass between the stars and new life could evolve.”
“But what if the seed was dropped, but nobody heard the signal and no light came?” Lythe asked. She could tell that he didn’t believe a word of the story but loved hearing it. It was just as if Nesta had never gone, as if she were still there telling him about what she had learned in her late-night reading.