A Tall History of Sugar. Curdella Forbes
it was revealed to him in a dream that there was an oil, the Oil of Patmosphere, which was a wonder cure for ancient ills, and he was astonished, when he went to investigate, that it was sold in MacKenzie's Drugstore in Montego Bay, but at a formidable price that would take him many years to save. "Man," the drugstore owner told him, "this is rare oil, requiring special composition. In more than fifty years no one but you has come to inquire of it. I cannot sell it for less."
Miss Hildreth and Samuel often saw Moshe, for he was allowed, as children seldom were, to play nearby while the grownups talked, though he was not a retarded child but overbright for his years and forgot nothing that he heard. Miss Hildreth fell into the habit of prophesying his future. "Him gwine have a hard time, Rachel. Dat skin an dat hair gwine mek him way in dis world hard-hard. Hard travail. Mi si it. Ehn-hn." This unresolved body in which history has made ructions will make his pilgrimage difficult. This is what I have seen.
And Rachel always answered her with a gentleness she showed to no one else. Having decided to "keep friend" (she felt, sometimes, against her better judgment), she had committed to accepting the obligations, including soft speech, that came with friendship, "No, him not gwine weary. It a-go sen him places, yu go si." (In her secret thoughts, "yu go si" translated into "retro me, Hildreth," a counterspell.)
Moshe learned to distrust Miss Hildreth and would never go near her. He found her unkind, and detested the things she said about him. In her presence, which he endured because his mother made him stay, he learned to close his ears, and if he allowed himself to hear anything that she said, it was only so he could discover how to guard from her his palaces, rooms of escape where like all only children he had learned to make a home. Before the closed doors of such rooms, counterspell he pinned Miss Hildreth like the donkey's tail flat against the wall. The wicked witch of the west, knocking unavailingly at the door.
Samuel he loved. For Samuel did him the grace of ignoring him, most of the time. Not only that, Samuel was a man of dreams. Moshe beheld him rise like an issue of smoke from a labyrinth, and the child was enchanted so that later when he discovered his gift of drawing, he drew, over and over again, scenes of Samuel flying, streaming tails like a comet, while his hundred eyes gleamed among columns of hair.
Once in a while Samuel noticed him, but in the strangest way, as if the child were a strand woven in his outlandish skein of dreams. One day he said, "Why yu tink this boy is the color of milk and honey?" posing this as a philosophical question, to which he fully intended to give the answer. With Samuel, a question was ever a rhetorical ruse.
Arrested, Moshe paused the toing-and-froing of his homemade horse on the squeaky verandah floor. The horse was built from a water bottle fitted at its bigger end into two condensed milk tins mounted on wheels cut from discarded Michelin tires and attached to the tins by cord strung through holes in their tops. The tins had been roped together a second time by more cord strung through the bottoms. The narrow, protruding part of the bottle formed the horse's neck and head. The horse was flexible in the space where the two tins met, but with its wheels it could have been a truck except that Moshe made it a horse, shouting, "Giddy-ap, giddy-ap, skuy!" from inside his head as he galloped it across the breathless floor.
"Hush," he told the horse now from inside his head. "Hush, brrrrr," and held his breath, waiting for the answer to Samuel's riddle which had mentioned him in it.
"Is the Oil of Patmosphere. Is the same way. Same way. The answer is there."
"Wha di answer?" Rachel asked, smiling.
"You have to come at it in a special way. Can't come at it like how people think."
Rachel waited for the unraveling, still smiling.
"Is Revelations," was Samuel's final pronouncement. "The boy is the power of Revelations."
Moshe became oblivious to the good-natured quarrel that followed this cryptic comment, Rachel insisting that Revelations had nothing in it about milk and honey; that was in the Old Testament, quoting to prove it, I will bring them up into a land flowing with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and Samuel insisting that she had missed the principle, it was about the future when all that was different would be one. The lion would lie down with the lamb.
Revelations. The listening child shivered with satisfaction. He liked that. Revelations was the book in their Bible where everything was going to come to an end with a tremendous bang, and the world would be made new. It was horrible and exciting, all at once. On his knees on the verandah pitching marbles with himself or playing with his pitchy-patchy trucks and his horses of bottle and tin, he pretended not to hear the conversation, but he muttered and played with the word under his breath, seeing how many permutations it could bend into, like river eels. Revelation. Relevation. Evationreli. Revellelation, Revelelelelelelelation, Reli. Vation. He giggled. The word astounded him with its beauty. The beauty of water playing on stones. He liked being associated with such loveliness.
"So how you use it though?" Rachel was asking. "The vision tell you that part?"
"Oh yes, oh yes," Samuel said in an exalted voice. "I receive everything clear-clear as day. I get up off my bed right there in the night-middle, and I write it down so that the vision would not escape from me. See it here." He showed crumpled brown paper torn from bags into which flour or sugar had been parceled. "Anoint your whole body and your hands with this oil, it must be on your palm when you shake another person hand. Say to the person, God be upon you and your hand will be like a grease, greasing the soul."
"Plenty people wipe all manner of thing upon they hand and shake other people hand with it and it kill who they shake hand with," Rachel observed. "Hidin murder in they hand. It good to extend a hand of fellowship."
"Oh God, oh God," Samuel said excitedly. "Das it exactly. Man, it sweeter than sugar."
The child frowned. It seemed on the one hand that it was not good to shake hands, but on the other, that shaking hands was good if it was done with the sacred oil. How would you know who had the right oil on their hand? Could you say, Mi nah shake yu hand cause mi nuh know wha yu put pon it? That would be rude to a grown person. He pondered that for a while and decided that it was the kind of question best left until one was grown up, since only bigpeople shook hands.
Twice Samuel brought him locusts to eat, a powdery brown fruit over a hard brown seed inside a hard brown shell shaped like a foot that you had to break with a stone. The fruit inside was delicious; it looked and tasted like cotton candy but had a foul smell like unwashed socks. Children called it stinking-toe. There were no stinking-toe trees in Tumela but only in Manayenni, the district beyond God's back where Samuel lived.
Apart from Samuel and Miss Hildreth, the only other persons who came to the house were the telegram boy who brought bad news on his bicycle, and was paid sixpence if the receiver of bad news had it to pay; and the Yahweh elder who journeyed from Ora once every hundred days to give Rachel scripture lessons, for in those days (and maybe even now) there was no Yahweh church in Tumela (Yahweh was not even recorded until many years later). The elder was a desiccated man who suffered from peptic ulcers and was uncomfortable around women. Because of this he muttered his teaching and left in a hurry. To supplement this desolate communion, Rachel received through the post office small books and pamphlets expounding the mysteries of Yahweh, and it was with these that she fed her strange beliefs and made her fragile peace with the life of poverty that she felt had dished her dirt.
So you understand, then. How growing up under the influence of these untoward ruminations and friendships and the isolations wrought by his mother's idiosyncrasies and his missing skin, Moshe became a mystic who soon lost the power of normal speech and could only be heard by someone who had also grown up in this way, or a way similar, like the boy in the story who, ostracized by his articulate siblings, falls back into nature and begins to ventriloquize the language of birds. When this happens, the boy is already in the forest, in the middle of his pilgrimage.
ii
The only time Moshe saw other children up close before he went to school was during a short period in his life when his mother did her washing in the other river. Not the River Raiding, whose