“This is black cornmeal,” he said, lifting the first bag up. “After my death, pour some out into your left hand, pass it around your head four times, and cast it away. This makes the road dark. It will prevent dream visits by the spirit. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes, Grandpa,” we said together.
“Good. The white cornmeal comes next,” he said, and he pointed to the second bag. “Take the white cornmeal in the right hand and sprinkle it, saying, ‘May you offer us your good wishes. May we be safe. May our days be fulfilled.’” Fletcher wrote it down. “This,” Grandpa said, “ensures the proper relation between the living and the dead. Now,” his voice grew softer, “on the fourth morning after my death, leave the windows and doors open so that my spirit can leave the house for good. There,” he said, pointing to the third bag — pine resin incense. “Burn this on the fourth day.”
“Be nice to Grandpa,” Fletcher said, walking into the room where my father stood conducting his imaginary orchestra, “because he is going to die soon.”
We walked in silence, the particular silence of midsummer. Father began to hum finally. Fletcher and I pointed to peacocks in cages, to raccoons and other small animals at the wildlife center. We scattered in the tall grasses. We followed Father into the woods, we breathed deeply as we saw him do. We held his hands; he said nothing.
We walked a long time — in fields, through flowers, in heat. The afternoon seemed slow and languid, when quite suddenly Father, who was so tall, bent down and in one motion, like a giraffe eating food from the earth’s floor, plucked a large, flat leaf from the ground, moved by some unknown force down and back up again.
“See this?” he said, looking at the leaf, shaking his head and laughing. “Children, look at this.”
We looked at the giant leaf I had no idea w hat Father might say He plucked another from the ground, then another, and knelt down next to us, his long arms scooping us up.
“These are the leaves!” he said. “These leaves. Back in Italy when I was a little boy, my grandmother used to dip these in egg and flour and fry them!” and he turned them over in their imaginary batter. “Oh, they were quite delicious.” He smiled.
“It’s been a long time now,” he said, gathering a few more leaves; we, too, picked them. “When she cooked them up that way they tasted just like veal.” He smiled a great smile; the memory warmed him and the warmth spilled onto us.
This was one of the happiest days of my life: clutching his hand, holding close the story of how his grandmother, who had never lived before this day, changed simple leaves for a young boy into veal.
“The way you hold your knife,” he sings, “the way we danced till three — the way you changed my life!” his voice rises and his heart swells. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me.
“No, they can’t take that away from me.”
“In New Orleans there is Mardi Gras — sweet smoke and Negroes and bourbon in the streets.”
“And jazz music,” Lucv savs.
It’s so exciting. The two girls giggle. Red lights and smoke and saxophones all night long.
“Old age finally killed Charlie,” my grandfather said, rubbing the ground’s brown belly. “One hundred and thirty years,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a long time to live.
“Natural causes, they said, killed him.” My grandfather stood up. “Heart failure — kidney failure — failure failure.”
“Don’t forget the soul,” we whispered to him.
He smiled. “Charlie could really tell a story,” my grandfather said. “Oh, yeah, Charlie could really talk. We’d chew the fat all night sometimes.”
I wished that I had had stories to tell my grandfather.
“You know, he’s telling them now somewhere,” he said as we looked down at the dirt. “Maybe in African this time around, who knows?”
Once, before his name was Charlie Jones, West Africa had been his home. Once, before the Fourth of July was his birthday, before the farmer Samuel Jones bought him, he remembered his mother taking the bones from a fish. “Other things, too,” my grandfather said. He remembered stripes, the black-and-white stripes of the zebra, and the heat of the sun, and how fast he could run.
“They were young and strong, Charlie and his brother, and the man on the ship docked in the Liberian port saw that and tricked them with a story about how there were fritter trees on board and lots of syrup.
I never saw any of it again: not my mother, or the zebras…,’ Charlie said, ‘except here, Angelo,’ and he pointed to his head.”
My grandfather tucked the Charlie stories, the stories of riding with the Jesse James gang, the stories of going off with Billy the Kid to get the man w ho killed Garfield, he tucked them all back in his head. The stories seemed shifting and vulnerable, unstable when compared with this burial scene. My grandfather thought of the fluidity of stories and the dead man with his mouth closed. They lowered the coffin into the ground.
“On the day of the Emancipation Proclamation,” Charlie had said, “there was now here to turn.”
The local people had all made death wreaths. The gladiolus pressed their ears to the ground, listening even now for more. And Charlie talked on.
“Here is the time for the sayable,” Rilke writes in the “Ninth Elegy.” “Here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness.”
Jack came on a Monday, unexpectedly, at 9:00 A.M. He was coming to mv apartment now more and more often; we were leaving our hotel little behind. He had never done this though, come early in the morning, early in the week, and when I first heard his voice over the intercom I felt unsure, then frightened, then delighted, all while he climbed the three floors up to me. Such fluctuation in emotion from floor to floor was exhausting. As I opened the door I must have looked tired.
“Wake up, Vanessa! Wake up! Wake up!” he said.
“What are you doing here?” I asked cautiously, as calmly as I could.
“I couldn’t stay away,” he said. “Please.” He looked like a boy on his first date, but it was morning, not evening, and, standing outside my door, he held a bag instead of the more conventional flowers.
“What’s in the bag, Jack?”
“Close your eyes.”
With my eyes closed I pictured him as he looked now standing in front of me, his arms full, a large smile on his face. I thought to myself that this was a new Jack, a different one. I le looked younger today, more robust than I’d ever seen him. I suspected that a woman was involved — he had fallen in love, perhaps he had just come from her, he was being someone new for someone else. He was clear-eyed, the decision had been made: he was going to leave me, the ambivalence was over, no more debating in his head.
“OK,” he said, walking in the door.
I opened my eyes. Out of the bag came croissants and brioches, smoked fish and fruit, champagne. I sighed. He smiled. Today he looked like a man any woman would want to marry, take home to her parents, spend her life with.
“Where did you buy all this?” The face of the other woman faded. The smells were of fruit and of yeast. The whole apartment seemed safe. I nuzzled up to him.
“I made it all,” he said. “I’ve been planning it for days. I was up all night.”
I looked at Jack, puzzled. I could not predict anything about this man who stood before me with a tray of salmon and pastry, his chest puffed with pride.
“You made it all?”
He nodded.
“But there are little doilies around these fruit tarts.”
“I know,” he smiled. “I bought the doilies.”