blackish candle wax. There were three old women staring at him.
Miss Noles threw the contents of a glass of water into his face.
“You didn’t have to do that either,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Mrs. Dunwiddy came into the room. She was holding a small brown glass bottle triumphantly. “Smelling salts,” she announced. “I know I got some somewhere. I buy these in, oh, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. I don’t know if they still any good.” She peered at Fat Charlie, then scowled. “He wake up. Who did wake him up?”
“He wasn’t breathing,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “So I give him a slap.”
“And I pour water on him,” said Miss Noles, “which help bring him around the rest of the way.”
“I don’t need smelling salts,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m already wet and in pain.” But, with elderly hands, Mrs. Dunwiddy had removed the cap from the bottle, and she was pushing it under his nose. He breathed in as he moved back, and inhaled a wave of ammonia. His eyes watered, and he felt as if he had been punched in the nose. Water dripped down his face.
“There,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “Feeling better now?”
“What time is it?” asked Fat Charlie.
“It’s almost five in the morning,” said Mrs. Higgler. She took a swig of coffee from her gigantic mug. “We all worried about you. You better tell us what happened.”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. It was not that it had evaporated, as dreams do, more as if the experience of the last few hours had happened to somebody else, someone who was not him, and he had to contact that person by some hitherto unpracticed form of telepathy. It was all a jumble in his mind, the technicolor Ozness of the other place dissolving back into the sepia tones of reality. “There were caves. I asked for help. There were lots of animals there. Animals who were people. None of them wanted to help. They were all scared of my daddy. Then one of them said she would help me.”
“She?” said Mrs. Bustamonte.
“Some of them were men, and some of them were women,” said Fat Charlie. “This one was a woman.”
“Do you know what she was? Crocodile? Hyena? Mouse?”
He shrugged. “I might have remembered before people started hitting me and pouring water on me. And putting things in my nose. It drives stuff out of your head.”
Mrs. Dunwiddy said, “Do you remember what I tell you? Not giving anything away? Only trade?”
“Yes,” he said, vaguely proud of himself. “Yes. There was a monkey who wanted me to give him things, and I said no. Look, I think I need a drink.”
Mrs. Bustamonte took a glass of something from the table. “We thought maybe you need a drink. So we put the sherry through the strainer. There may be a few mixed herbs in there, but nothin’ big.”
His hands were fists in his lap. He opened his right hand to take the glass from the old woman. Then he stopped, and he stared.
“What?” asked Mrs. Dunwiddy. “What is it?”
In the palm of his hand, black and crushed out of shape, and wet with sweat, Fat Charlie was holding a feather. He remembered, then. He remembered all of it.
“It was the Bird Woman,” he said.
Gray dawn was breaking as Fat Charlie climbed into the passenger seat of Mrs. Higgler’s station wagon.
“You sleepy?” she asked him.
“Not really. I just feel weird.”
“Where do you want me to take you? My place? Your dad’s house? A motel?”
“I don’t know.”
She put the car into gear and lurched out into the road.
“Where are we going?”
She did not answer. She slurped some coffee from her megamug. Then she said, “Maybe what we do tonight is for the best and maybe it ain’t. Sometimes family things, they best left for families to fix. You and your brother. You’re too similar. I guess that is why you fight.”
“I take it this is some obscure West Indian usage of the word ‘similar’ which means ‘nothing at all alike’?”
“Don’t you start going all British on me. I know what I’m sayin’. You and him, you both cut from the same cloth. I remember your father sayin’ to me, Callyanne, my boys, they stupider than—you know, it don’t matter what he actually said, but the point is, he said it about both of you.” A thought struck her. “Hey. When you go to the place where the old gods are, you see your father in that place?”
“I don’t think so. I’d remember.”
She nodded, and said nothing as she drove.
She parked the car, and they got out.
It was chilly in the Florida dawn. The Garden of Rest looked like something from a movie: there was a low ground mist which threw everything into soft focus. Mrs. Higgler opened the small gate, and they walked through the cemetery.
Where there had been only fresh earth filling his father’s grave, now there was turf, and at the head of the grave was a metal plaque with a metal vase built into it, and in the vase a single yellow silk rose.
“Lord have mercy on the sinner in this grave,” said Mrs Higgler, with feeling. “Amen, amen, amen.”
They had an audience: the two red-headed cranes which Fat Charlie had observed on his previous visit strutted toward them, heads bobbing, like two aristocratic prison visitors.
“Shoo!” said Mrs. Higgler. The birds started at her, incuriously, and did not leave.
One of them ducked its head down into the grass, came up again with a lizard struggling in its beak. A gulp and a shake, and the lizard was a bulge in the bird’s neck.
The dawn chorus was beginning: grackles and orioles and mockingbirds were singing in the day in the wilderness beyond the Garden of Rest. “It’ll be good to be home again,” said Fat Charlie. “With any luck she’ll have made him leave by the time I get there. Then everything will be all right. I can sort everything out with Rosie.” A mood of gentle optimism welled up within him. It was going to be a good day.
In the old stories, Anansi lives just like you do or I do, in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi’s side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories. Mawu gave him the stories, back in the dawn days, took them from Tiger and gave them to Anansi, and he spins the web of them so beautifully.
In the stories, Anansi is a spider, but he is also a man. It is not hard to keep two things in your head at the same time. Even a child could do it.
Anansi’s stories are told by grandmothers and by aunts in the West Coast of Africa and across the Caribbean, and all over the world. The stories have made it into books for children: big old smiling Anansi playing his merry tricks upon the world. Trouble is, grandmothers and aunts and writers of books for children tend to leave things out. There are stories that aren’t appropriate for little children anymore.
This is a story you won’t find in the nursery tales. I call it,
Anansi did not like Bird, because when Bird was hungry she ate many things, and one of the things that Bird ate was spiders, and Bird, she was always hungry.
They used to be friends, but they were friends no longer.
One day Anansi was walking, and he saw a hole in the ground, and that gave him an idea. He puts wood in the bottom of the hole, and he makes a fire, and he puts a cookpot in the hole and drops in roots and herbs. Then he starts running around the pot, running and dancing and calling and shouting, going, I feel good. I feel
