Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6) - Page 13
One
Ka might have put that downtown bus where it was when Mia's cab pulled up, or it might only have been coincidence. Certainly it's the sort of question that provokes argument from the humblest street-preacher (can you give me hallelujah) all the way up to the mightiest of theological philosophers (can you give me a Socratic amen). Some might consider it almost frivolous; the mighty issues that loom their shadows behind the question, however, are anything but.
One downtown bus, half empty.
But if it hadn't been there on the corner of Lex and Sixty-first, Mia likely would never have noticed the man playing the guitar. And, had she not stopped to listen to the man playing the guitar, who knows how much of what followed might have been different?
Two
"Awwww,man, wouldja looka-dat!" the cab driver exclaimed, and lifted his hand to his windshield in an exasperated gesture. A bus was parked on the corner of Lexington and Sixty-first, its diesel engine rumbling and its taillights flashing what Mia took to be some kind of distress code. The bus driver was standing by one of the rear wheels, looking at the dark cloud of diesel smoke pouring from the bus's rear vent.
"Lady," said the cab driver, "you mind getting off on the corner of Sixtieth? Tha'be all right?"
Is it?Mia asked.What should I say?
Sure,Susannah replied absently.Sixtieth's fine.
Mia's question had called her back from her version of the Dogan, where she'd been trying to get in touch with Eddie. She'd had no luck doing that, and was appalled at the state of the place. The cracks in the floor now ran deep, and one of the ceiling panels had crashed down, bringing the fluorescent lights and several long snarls of electrical cable with it. Some of the instrument panels had gone dark. Others were seeping tendrils of smoke. The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO dial was all the way over into the red. Below her feet, the floor was vibrating and the machinery was screaming. And saying that none of this was real, it was all only a visualization technique, kind of missed the whole point, didn't it? She'd shut down a very powerful process, and her body was paying a price. The Voice of the Dogan had warned her that what she was doing was dangerous; that it wasn't (in the words of a TV ad) nice to fool Mother Nature. Susannah had no idea which of her glands and organs were taking the biggest beating, but she knew that theywere hers. Not Mia's. It was time to call a halt to this madness before everything went sky-high.
First, though, she'd tried to get in touch with Eddie, yelling his name repeatedly into the mike with NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS stamped on it. Nothing. Yelling Roland's name also brought no result. If they were dead, she would have known it. She was sure of that. But not to be able to get in touch with them atall …what did that mean?
It mean you once mo' been fucked mos' righteous, honeychile,Detta told her, and cackled.This what you get fo' messin wit' honkies.
I can get out here?Mia was asking, shy as a girl arriving at her first dance.Really?
Susannah would have slapped her own brow, had she had one. God, when it was about anything but her baby, the bitch was so goddamtimid!
Yes, go ahead. It's only a single block, and on the avenues, the blocks are short.
The driver…how much should I give the driver?
Give him a ten and let him keep the change. Here, hold it out for me –
Susannah sensed Mia's reluctance and reacted with weary anger. This was not entirely without amusement.
Listen to me, sweetheart, I wash my hands of you. Okay? Give him any fucking bill you want.
No, no, it's all right.Humble now. Frightened.I trust you, Susannah. And she held up the remaining bills from Mats, fanned out in front of her eyes like a hand of cards.
Susannah almost refused, but what was the point? Shecame forward, took control of the brown hands holding the money, selected a ten, and gave it to the driver. "Keep the change," she said.
"Thanks, lady!"
Susannah opened the curbside door. A robot voice began to speak when she did, startling her – startling both of them. It was someone named Whoopi Goldberg, reminding her to take her bags. For Susannah-Mia, the question of her gunna was moot. There was only one piece of baggage which concerned them now, and of this Mia would soon be delivered.
She heard guitar music. At the same time she felt her control over the hand stuffing money back into her pocket and the leg swinging out of the cab begin to ebb. Mia, taking over again now that Susannah had solved another of her little New York dilemmas. Susannah began to struggle against this usurpation
(mybody, goddammit, mine,at least from the waist up, and that includes the head and the brain inside it! )
and then quit. What was the use? Mia was stronger. Susannah had no idea why that should be, but she knew that it was.
A kind of queerBushido fatalism had come over Susannah Dean by this point. It was the sort of calmness that cloaks the drivers of cars skidding helplessly toward bridge overpasses, the pilots of planes that heel over into their final dives, their engines dead…and gunslingers driven to their final cave or draw. Later she might fight, if fighting seemed either worthwhile or honorable. She would fight to save herself or the baby, but not Mia – this was her decision. Mia had forfeited any chance of rescue she might once have deserved, in Susannah's eyes.
For now there was nothing to do, except maybe to turn the LABOR FORCE dial back to 10. She thought she would be allowed that much control.
Before that, though…the music. The guitar. It was a song she knew, and knew well. She had sung a version of it to thefolken the night of their arrival in Calla Bryn Sturgis.
After all she had been through since meeting Roland, hearing "Man of Constant Sorrow" on this New York streetcorner did not strike her as coincidental in the least. And it was a wonderful song, wasn't it? Perhaps the vertex of all the folk songs she had so loved as a younger woman, the ones that had seduced her, step by step, into activism and had led her finally to Oxford, Mississippi. Those days were gone – she felt ever so much older than she had then – but this song's sad simplicity still appealed to her. The Dixie Pig was less than a block from here. Once Mia had transported them through its doors, Susannah would be in the Land of the Crimson King. She had no doubts or illusions about that. She did not expect to return from there, did not expect to see either her friends or her beloved again, and had an idea she might have to die with Mia's cheated howls for company…but none of that had to interfere with her enjoyment of this song now. Was it her death-song? If so, fine.
Susannah, daughter of Dan, reckoned there could have been far worse.
Three
The busker had set up shop in front of a caf¨¦ called Black-strap Molasses. His guitar case was open in front of him, its purple velvet interior (exactly the same shade as the rug in sai King's Bridgton bedroom, can you say amen) scattered with change and bills, just so any unusually innocent passersby would know the right thing to do. He was sitting on a sturdy wooden cube which looked exactly like the one upon which the Rev. Harrigan stood to preach.
There were signs that he was almost through for the night. He had put on his jacket, which bore a New York Yankees patch on the sleeve, and a hat withJOHN LENNON LIVES printed above the bill. There had apparently been a sign in front of him but now it was back in his instrument case, words-side down. Not that Mia would have known what was writ upon it in any case, not she.
He looked at her, smiled, and quit his fingerpicking. She raised one of the remaining bills and said, "I'll give you this if you'll play that song again. All of it, this time."
The young man looked about twenty, and while there was nothing very handsome about him, with his pale, spotty complexion, the gold ring in one of his nostrils, and the cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, he had an engaging air. His eyes widened as he realized whose face was on the bit of currency she was holding. "Lady, for fifty bucks I'd play every Ralph Stanley song I know…and I know quite a few of em."
"Just this one will do us fine," Mia said, and tossed the bill. It fluttered into the busker's guitar case. He watched its prankish descent with disbelief. "Hurry," Mia said. Susannah was quiet, but Mia sensed her listening. "My time is short. Play."
And so the guitar-player sitting on the box in front of the caf¨¦ began to play a song Susannah had first heard in The Hungry i, a song she had herself sung at God only knew how many hootenannies, a song she'd once sung behind a motel in Oxford, Mississippi. The night before they had all been thrown in jail, that had been. By then those three young voter-registration boys had been missing almost a month, gone into the black Mississippi earth somewhere in the general vicinity of Philadelphia (they were eventually found in the town of Longdale, can you give me hallelujah, can you please say amen). That fabled White Sledgehammer had begun once more to swing in the redneck toolies, but they had sung anyway. Odetta Holmes – Det, they called her in those days – had begun this particular song and then the rest of them joined in, the boys singingman and the girls singingmaid. Now, rapt within the Dogan which had become her gulag, Susannah listened as this young man, unborn in those terrible old days, sang it again. The cofferdam of her memory broke wide open and it was Mia, unprepared for the violence of these recollections, who was lifted upon the wave.
Four
In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.
In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick…but their hands never move.
There is an Unfound Door
(O lost)
and memory is the key which opens it.
Five
Their names are Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner; these are those who fall beneath the swing of the White Sledgehammer on the 19th of June, 1964.
O Discordia!
Six
They're staying at a place called the Blue Moon Motor Hotel, on the Negro side of Oxford, Mississippi. The Blue Moon is owned by Lester Bambry, whose brother John is pastor of the First Afro-American Methodist Church of Oxford, can you give me hallelujah, can you say amen.
It is July 19th of 1964, a month to the day after the disappearance of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Three days after they disappeared somewhere around Philadelphia there was a meeting at John Bambry's church and the local Negro activists told the three dozen or so remaining white northerners that in light of what was now happening, they were of course free to go home. And some of themhavegone home, praise God, but Odetta Holmes and eighteen others stay. Yes. They stay at the Blue Moon Motor Hotel. And sometimes at night they go out back, and Delbert Anderson brings his guitar and they sing.
"I Shall Be Released," they sing and
"John Henry," they sing, gonna whop the steel on down (great Gawd, say Gawd-bomb), and they sing
"Blowin in the Wind" and they sing
"Hesitation Blues" by the Rev. Gary Davis, all of them laughing at the amiably risqu¨¦ verses: a dollar is a dollar and a dime is a dime I got a houseful of chillun ain't none of em mine, and they sing
"I Ain't Marchin Anymore" and they sing
in the Land of Memory and the Kingdom of Ago they sing
in the blood-heat of their youth, in the strength of their bodies, in the confidence of their minds they sing
to deny Discordia
to deny the can toi
in affirmation of Gan the Maker, Gan the Evil-taker
they don't know these names
they know all these names
the heart sings what it must sing
the blood knows what the blood knows
on the Path of the Beam our hearts know all the secrets
and they sing
Odetta begins and Delbert Anderson plays; she sings
"I am a maid of constant sorrow…I've seen trouble all my days…I bid farewell…to old Kentucky…"
Seven
So Mia was ushered through the Unfound Door and into the Land of Memory, transported to the weedy yard behind Lester Bambry's Blue Moon Motor Hotel, and so she heard –
(hears)
Eight
Mia hears the woman who will become Susannah as she sings her song. She hears the others join in, one by one, until they are all singing together in a choir, and overhead is the Mississippi moon, raining its radiance down on their faces – some black, some white – and upon the cold steel rails of the tracks which run behind the hotel, tracks which run south from here, which run out to Longdale, the town where on August 5th of 1964 the badly decomposed bodies of their amigos will be found – James Cheney, twenty-one; Andrew Goodman, twenty-one; Michael Schwerner, twenty-four; O Discordia! And to you who favor darkness, give you joy of the red Eye that shines there.
She hears them sing.
All thro' this Earth I'm bound to ramble…Thro' storm and wind, thro' sleet and rain…I'm bound to ride that Northern railroad…
Nothing opens the eye of memory like a song, and it is Odetta's memories that lift Mia and carry her as they sing together, Det and her ka-mates under the silvery moon. Mia sees them walking hence from here with their arms linked, singing
(oh deep in my heart…I do believe…)
another song, the one they feel defines them most clearly. The faces lining the street and watching them are twisted with hate. The fists being shaken at them are callused. The mouths of the women who purse their lips to shoot the spit that will clabber their cheeks dirty their hair stain their shirts are paintless and their legs are without stockings and their shoes are nothing but runover lumps. There are men in overalls (Oshkosh-by-gosh, someone say hallelujah). There are teenage boys in clean white sweaters and flattop haircuts and one of them shouts at Odetta, carefully articulating each word:We Will Kill! Every! Goddam! Nigger! Who Steps Foot On The Campus Of Ole Miss!
And the camaraderie in spite of the fear.Because of the fear. The feeling that they are doing something incredibly important: something for the ages. They will change America, and if the price is blood, why then they will pay it. Say true, say hallelujah, praise God, give up your loud amen.
Then comes the white boy named Darryl, and at first he couldn't, he was limp and he couldn't, and then later on he could and Odetta's secret other – the screaming, laughing, ugly other – never came near. Darryl and Det lay together until morning, slept spoons until morning beneath the Mississippi moon. Listening to the crickets. Listening to the owls. Listening to the soft smooth hum of the Earth turning on its gimbals, turning and turning ever further into the twentieth century. They are young, their blood runs hot, and they never doubt their ability to change everything.
It's fare you well, my own true lover…
This is her song in the weeds behind the Blue Moon Motor Hotel; this is her song beneath the moon.
I'll never see your face again…
It's Odetta Holmes at the apotheosis of her life, and Mia isthere! She sees it, feels it, is lost in its glorious and some would say stupid hope (ah but I say hallelujah, we all say Gawd-bomb). She understands how being afraid all the time makes one's friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever, leading on to velvet night, and theyknow James Cheney is dead
(say true)
theyknow Andrew Goodman is dead
(say hallelujah)
theyknow Michael Schwerner – oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four – is dead.
(Give up your loudest amen!)
They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia.At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she's with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.
The girls singmaid, the boys singman.
Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.
At first, too stunned to laugh or to cry, she can only listen, amazed.
Nine
As the busker began the fourth verse, Susannah joined in, at first tentatively and then – at his encouraging smile – with a will, harmonizing above the young man's voice:
For breakfast we had bulldog gravy
For supper we had beans and bread
The miners don't have any dinner
And a tick of straw they call a bed…
Ten
The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. "I thought I was the only one who knew that one," he said. "It's the way the Freedom Riders used to – "
"No," Susannah said quietly. "Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of '64. When those three boys were killed."
"Schwerner and Goodman," he said. "I can't remember the name of the – "
"James Cheney," she said quietly. "He had the most beautifulhair. "
"You talk as though you knew him," he said, "but you can't be much over…thirty?"
Susannah had an idea she looked a good deal older than thirty, especially tonight, but of course this young man had fifty dollars more in his guitar case now than had been there a single song ago, and it had perhaps affected his eyesight.
"My mother spent the summer of '64 in Neshoba County," Susannah said, and with two spontaneously chosen words – my mother – did her captor more damage than she could have imagined. Those words flayed open Mia's heart.
"Cool on Mom!" the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. "Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma'am."
"I really couldn't," Susannah said, smiling. "Remember the struggle, that'd be enough for me. And remember Jimmy, Andy, and Michael, if it does ya. I know it would do me just fine."
"Please," the young man persisted. He was smiling again but the smile was troubled and he might have been any of those young men from the Land of Ago, singing in the moonlight between the slumped ass-ends of the Blue Moon's shacky little units and the double-hammered heatless moonlight gleam of the railroad tracks; he could have been any in his beauty and the careless flower of his youth and how in that moment Mia loved him. Even her chap seemed secondary in that glow. She knew it was in many ways a false glow, imparted by the memories of her hostess, and yet she suspected that in other ways it might be real. She knew one thing for sure: only a creature such as herself, who'd had immortality and given it up, could appreciate the raw courage it took to stand against the forces of Discordia. To risk that fragile beauty by putting beliefs before personal safety.
Make him happy, take it back,she told Susannah, but would notcome forward and make Susannah do so. Let it be her choice.
Before Susannah could reply, the alarm in the Dogan went off, flooding their shared mind with noise and red light.
Susannah turned in that direction, but Mia grabbed her shoulder in a grip like a claw before she could go.
What's happening? What's gone wrong?
Let me loose!
Susannah twisted free. And before Mia could grab her again, she was gone.
Eleven
Susannah's Dogan pulsed and flared with red panic-light. A Klaxon hammered an audio tattoo from the overhead speakers. All but two of the TV screens – one still showing the busker on the corner of Lex and Sixtieth, the other the sleeping baby – had shorted out. The cracked floor was humming under Susannah's feet and throwing up dust. One of the control panels had gone dark, and another was in flames.
This looked bad.
As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. "WARNING!" it cried. "SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!"
Susannah couldn't remember any Section Alpha from her previous visits to the Dogan, but wasn't surprised to now see a sign labeled just that. One of the panels near it suddenly erupted in a gaudy shower of orange sparks, setting the seat of a chair on fire. More ceiling panels fell, trailing snarls of wiring.
"WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!"
What about the EMOTIONAL TEMP dial?
"Leave it alone," she muttered to herself.
Okay, CHAP? What about that one?
After a moment's thought, Susannah flipped the toggle from ASLEEP to AWAKE and those disconcerting blue eyes opened at once, staring into Susannah's with what looked like fierce curiosity.
Roland's child,she thought with a strange and painful mixture of emotions.And mine. As for Mia? Girl, you nothing but a ka-mai. I'm sorry for you.
Ka-mai, yes. Not just a fool, but ka's fool – a fool of destiny.
"WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!"
So waking the baby hadn't done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.
She reached out for the absurd LABOR FORCE control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother's stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was aneasing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.
The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.
Susannah turned LABOR FORCE to 8, paused there, then shrugged. What the hell, it was time to go for broke, get this over with. She turned the dial all the way to 10. The moment it was there, a great glossy pain hardened her stomach and then rolled lower, gripping her pelvis. She had to tighten her lips against a scream.
"POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED," said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susannah knew all too well. "THANKS A WHOLE HEAP, LI'L COWGIRL."
She had to tighten her lips against another scream – not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn't stop the fear.
"LABOR…HAS COMMENCED," said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. "LABOR…HAS COMMENCED." Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU…BABE!…HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY…DEAR MORDRED…HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO YOU!"
Susannah visualized a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind her, and when she turned it was, of course, right there (she had not imagined the little sign reading ONLY YOU AND SOMBRA CAN HELP PREVENT CONSOLE FIRES, however – that, along with a drawing of Shardik o' the Beam in a Smokey the Bear hat, was some other joker's treat). As she hurried across the cracked and uneven floor to get the extinguisher, skirting the fallen ceiling panels, another pain ripped into her, lighting her belly and thighs on fire, making her want to double over and bear down on the outrageous stone in her womb.
Not going to take long,she thought in a voice that was part Susannah and part Detta.No ma'am. This chap comin in on the express train!
But then the pain let up slightly. She snatched the extinguisher off the wall when it did, trained the slim black horn on the flaming control panel, and pressed the trigger. Foam billowed out, coating the flames. There was a baleful hissing sound and a smell like burning hair.
"THE FIRE…IS OUT," the Voice of the Dogan proclaimed. "THE FIRE…IS OUT." And then changing, quick as a flash, to a plummy British Lord Haw-Haw accent:
"I SAY,JOLLY GOOD SHOW, SEW-ZANNAH, AB-SO-LUTELYBRILLLL-IANT! "
She lurched across the minefield of the Dogan's floor again, seized the microphone, and pressed the transmit toggle. Above her, on one of the TV screens still operating, she could see that Mia was on the move again, crossing Sixtieth.
Then Susannah saw the green awning with the cartoon pig, and her heart sank. Not Sixtieth, but Sixty-first.The hijacking mommybitch had reached her destination.
"Eddie!" she shouted into the microphone. "Eddie or Roland!" And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. "Jake! Pere Callahan! We've reached the Dixie Pig and we're going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!"
She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words DIXIE PIG? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn't hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.
"Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it!I love you! This is…" Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.
Unless something went wrong, that was.
She realized she was still gripping the mike.
"This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka."
She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.
Twelve
Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she'd reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia's mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had calledhim was The Jewboy.) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned wasfraught, like still air before a violent September storm.
Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!
Yes, Mia.
I agreed to mortality.
So you said.
And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal andterribly pregnant.
Yet I've missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven't I?The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse.And there's no time for you to tell me. Not now.
Go somewhere else,Susannah said, with no hope at all.Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We'll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge –
If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we'll die with it.She spoke with utter certainty.And I willhave it. I've been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But…Susannah…before we go in…you spoke of your mother.
I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.
Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!
There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.
Look,she said.
Thirteen
In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.
There is an Unfound Door
(O lost)
and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman's throat. She's sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.
"Odetta, come and sit with me," says the woman at the table, she who is mother. "Have something sweet. You lookgood, girl."
And she smiles.
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!
Fourteen
Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann's tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia's breath
(you lookgood,girl )
and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be…if,that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.
The rewards?
Immeasurable.
In the endyou could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun.You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood's harbor. You could be the wind in that child's unfurled sails.
You.
Odetta, come and sit with me.
Mia's breath began to hitch in her chest.
Have something sweet.
Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.
You lookgood,girl.
Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years – or three – was better than no time at all. She couldn't read, hadn't been to Morehouse, hadn't been tono house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.
Oh…
Oh, but…
Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to himYou look good,son!
She began to weep.
What have I donewas a terrible question.What else couldI have done was perhaps even worse.
O Discordia!
Fifteen
This was Susannah's one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, thesk?ldpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia's white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.
She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.
Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.
Sixteen
It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electricflambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Herchap cried out to be fed.
That's not pork, Mia,Susannah said, and was ignored.
As the doors were closed behind her – there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them – she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor her