blood and absorbed enough poison to die slowly of my own accord. In any event, he’d not be back to torture me in the morning. I was delivered.
I slept soundly that night, stirring only in the wee hours, my belly growling from the mixture of metallic and mineral substances forced down my throat. I craved something substantial to eat and envisioned a banquet of sponge cakes, rice pudding, and
“If you insist on leaving,” Mother shouted, “then John and I will not be here when you return.”
“May, try to understand that I am doing this for the three of us,” Papa replied, calling Mama by his favorite name for her. “If you could just — ”
“The three of us! How can you consider leaving with your son in the state that he is?”
“I have already put off leaving twice before. The ship sails the day after tomorrow. I must be on it.”
“And how will you tell this to John?”
“I shall tell him the truth, as I always have.”
“Shall the truth take care of him while you are gone? Shall the truth keep him from madness?”
My pulse began to race when I realized that Papa might be leaving out of disappointment with me. I turned the handle of their door.
“John?” Mama gasped. She was standing in her nightdress, holding in her hand a pewter candlestick with a lighted taper.
Father was naked except for the nightcap on his head and was sitting on their bed. Had I been feeling myself I surely would have had a good laugh.
“Come in, laddie,” he said, beckoning me forward.
When he reached for me, I ran to him, crying. He picked me up and held me tight. I burrowed my head into his shoulder.
Mama came to us and kissed me where the leeches had sucked out my lifeblood. I shall never forget how she kept repeating, “Everything is going wrong — everything …”
Father informed me that he was leaving on a long voyage.
“Is it … is it because of me? Do you hate me, Papa?”
“Of course not, John. I could never hate you. It has to do with us — with the family. Give me a moment, and I shall tell you.” He slipped on his dressing gown, then took his pipe from their dresser and began filling it with tobacco from his pouch.
“Are you leaving too?” I asked my mother.
“No, John, I shall be right here with you.” She sat with me, left a kiss in the palm of my hand, and balled it into a fist for me to keep. “I shall always be with you.”
After fiddling with his pipe and lighting it, Papa announced in a grand exhalation of smoke, “I am making a voyage to southern Africa, John. Please do not be upset, but I shall be gone for some time.”
“What’s in Africa?”
“Land for our vineyard.”
“But we have land upriver.”
Despite Mama’s arm around my shoulder, I was still shivering. Papa clapped his hands. “Come, get under the covers. You’re frozen.”
“In you go,” my mother said, lifting the sheet and blanket over me, smiling with renewed courage.
Papa sat down next to me and smoothed the red blanket of English wool over my chest and legs. Mama climbed in, put her arm under my head, and tickled my ear.
Tracing the stem of his pipe in the air, Father said, “I shall be taking a ship down the Gold Coast, past Angola to the very tip of Africa.” He dotted his destination with a jab. “The British have taken the Cape. Soon there will be thousands of men farming that rich land.”
“But we have seven acres upriver. You told me so.”
“Aye, son, that’s true enough. But at the Cape there are plots the size of Porto that the British government is selling for next to nothing. Imagine, John, within a few years, I shall have enough to purchase a hundred acres. Even two hundred, laddie. Here in Portugal, that will never be within my means.”
“You mean … you mean we might move to Africa?” I asked.
“Aye, but not right away, son. In a few years — if I find the right place. That is why I’m leaving now. Do you understand?”
I said I did, but I was confused.
“All will be well. Now, go to sleep like a good wee
“But I’m hungry,” I exclaimed. “I think there’s a hole in my belly.”
“At four in the morning?” Mama asked.
“I want something sweet. I’m all sore inside.”
Papa laughed, then shook his head and said in his broadest Scots accent, “Dearest May, you cannot fight a lad who needs some porridge in his belly.”
Mama made me
Two days later, at just past eight in the morning, he was saying his farewells to us on the wharf. Dressed in a blue serge traveling coat, bristling with excitement, he kissed first me and then my mother. After lifting me up for a final twirl in the air, he doffed his hat to us and told us again not to worry.
Boarding his tall-masted English vessel, he was off for Lisbon, then Africa. I should like to say that he offered some final words of counsel to me, but I remember that all he said to us both was, “Do not think too harshly of me. I mean to do only well. That is all I’ve ever desired.”
And so my mother and I were left alone for nearly two and a half months, until late August. I should like to say that we prospered together, but through an alchemical process known only to those left behind by their loved ones, we turned all that might have shimmered gold to the basest lead.
I cannot say whether I truly desired to kill myself, nor can I say why I chose our rooftop. I only know that a few days after Papa’s departure, on a night of insomnia, I burned with fever once more. Daniel appeared at my bedside. Wearing a mask with a long snout and antlers, he said that my death would enable him to join God in heaven. I had no reason not to believe him.
It was nearly sunrise. I went up to the Lookout Tower, climbed through the dormer window in our roof, walked solemnly to the edge, closed my eyes, and jumped. I did not wake to find myself in heaven with my old friend as I’d expected. Instead, I was lying on the cold cobbles, and a man with a beard I’d never seen before was peering at me from an alarmingly close distance.
I had been discovered by a nearsighted vegetable peddler, who, after assuring himself that I was still breathing, banged on our front door till my mother was roused. On seeing me motionless, my eyes closed, she was certain her only child had been taken forever from her.
Dr. Silva, our neighborhood physician, later discovered that I had fractured my right leg just below the knee, bruised my left hip, and suffered lacerations to my forehead and hands. Once I had been stitched, salved, and bandaged, Mama explained to the physician, to Senhora Beatriz, and to anyone else who asked that I had momentarily fantasized I could fly.
I vehemently denied having seen Daniel when asked.
Over the next days, Mama kept vigil in my room while I recovered from my injuries. She grew so worried about me that she could not even play her pianoforte. Often, she would pick nervously at the pretty floral embroidery she sewed on the collars of her dresses.
We might have continued down this anxious road had my mother not discovered that by administering a half teaspoonful of a sweet-smelling liquid contained in a small amber vial marked
