The Old

Body and Blood

The way of life writhes like a serpent from right to left, from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thought.

-The Red Book

Again, she sees the ship. She has seen this ship every night, but tonight she looks into the hold and it is looking at black bodies lined like sardines, all chained back to front, back to front, indignities revealed, and there is terror, the taste of fear and dread and despair more fetid than the smell of bodies. But all that night there have been those calling out and chanting and even when the white men could bear it no longer, came down and beat the manacled singers, still the chanting went on. That was her last dream and she could not get out of it. In that dream the storm was brewing.

Tonight there are peasants sitting in a stone cottage, or at least they appear to be peasants, and the storm is mightier than any they have seen all summer. The shutters are bolted, and they thank God that the house is strong and stone. There are men in that house, but she sees the woman. She is old and sitting by the fire and she croons, “They come. They come tonight, they come, and we have been separated from them so long.”

So there is in the woman’s accent, the confirmation they are some type of peasants, not Americans. Or maybe they are Americans, Puritans? Colonists?

“Let us go out to see,” says one, “you do not know what you’ll find tonight.”

“In a wind like this?” says another young man. “We might as well wait till the morrow.”

“Faint heart never won fair treasure.”

The first one goes out into the hills and is nearly blown away by the tempest of grey upon dark grey and the blue grey wetness of clouds and wind and lightning revealed stone. On the edge of the sea is a ship, and now the ship, so tall, so high masted, though many of the sails have come down, drifts toward the shore, turns on its side and slowly capsizes.

“Booty!” the fellow cries. “Treasure.”

The morning is grey and the sun weak. As they pick across the sand, now they find naked and black and blinking men and women like to whom they have never seen. They are not on their sides. They are sitting in a circle on the water, heedless of the cold, and when the first man calls out to them, the younger man says, “Josiah, don’t be a fool. They don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Are they slaves?” he demands. “Was that a slave ship?”

Cupping his hands to his mouth as if this would do something, the one called Josiah cries, “Are you slaves!”

There is a sharp rap to his head. The old woman is there. She must have been there all along. She says, “Thems is not slaves. They’s people. Might have been made to slaves, but free now.”

“We could sell ‘em and make a fair price.”

“They would kill you,” says the first man to Josiah.

All the black men and women have turned with faces like mahogany masks, smooth and imperious, but beyond their hauteur, unreadable. The white peasants approach slowly.

In the midst of them rises a woman who seems as if she might be old, though her face is dark and smooth as jet, and she bears a bundle wrapped in battered cloth.

“Madam,” the old woman says, “Is you like us? Like me?”

The black woman’s eyes narrow, but not in anger, perhaps in concentration.

“I am…” the old woman says, “of the Wise kind, best as I can be.”

“My nan claims to be a witch,” Josiah clarifies to the black woman who cannot understand him and does not acknowledge his existence.

“Claims to and is,” the old woman says, “and shall be the end of you and me if you keep shouting such things in times as these.”

The black woman is silent, She seems, in her nakedness, to become more and more like stone, like a goddess, less and less like a slave, less and less likely to speak, but at last she says, “Witch?”

Then she shakes the cloth from what she holds and the men gasp at a bowl of deep yellow gold, a shallow crater.

Josiah rushes forward.

“A witch and thief to boot—” he begins, touching the bowl which the woman does not pull away from him, but even as he touches it, the younger man, Elias, screams, and the old woman pulls her shawl away, but says nothing as Josiah is swallowed in flames, a great hot whish of fire that passes quickly and leaves charred bones, grasping hands, a mouth still open in a silent scream, standing for just a moment before it crumbles to black dust before the black woman.

“Yes,” the black woman says. “Witch.”

She gestures to those around her now standing. She says, of them, “Witch. Ship, it take us. Storm we make. Home we are. New home.”

“Yes,” The old woman nods, coming forward, heedless of the charred remains of Josiah. “Your new home. I felt you coming. Your kind here, we felt you coming. You are home.”

When Laurie arrived he looked strange in her dorm room, and she said so.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said pleasantly.

There was something about him, too much of a grown up, too polished, too handsome in his three piece suit, too… and she felt foolish for thinking this, kind. Hadn’t he warned her? He was a vampire, and not one of those new sweet ones from the teen section of the bookstore. He took life all the time, so how could she think of him as sweet?

“It was good of you to come and get me,” Loreal said.

“Not at all. Besides, the truth is I was eager to see you again.”

Loreal smiled and hugged him with a disarming innocence.

“That means a lot. I was glad to see you, too. Especially after you skipped off like that last time. Disappearing and everything.”

Laurie shrugged.

“Well, you know, that’s what we do. Vampires.”

“So you’ve been having these dreams since you started reading the book?” Laurie said as they whizzed along the country roads under the white sky, and the pale stubble fields passed.

“Yes,” Loreal said. “But the dreams don’t seem to have anything to do with the book.”

“Okay. What’s the book about?”

“My grandmother’s life, and it turns out she’s kind of old. I mean, like really old.”

“Well, I think we knew that. I mean, Owen’s not as young as he looks.”

“No,” Loreal agreed. “And my grandfather, Augustus that is, does not look old at all. My grandmother… I guess she let herself become old. But… she’s just a lot older than I thought.”

Laurie turning from watching the road to look at Loreal was disconcerting when she realized that, unlike a normal driver, Laurie was not turning back to look at the road.

“I wish you’d stop that.”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me what you learned.”

“My grandmother was the daughter of a plantation owner in the South. In South Carolina. That’s where she met my grandfather.”

“You mean like… Well, wait,” Laurie said, scowling as he kept his eyes on the road more for Loreal’s ease than his need. “Like they were alive in eighteen sixty-five.”

And then Laurie said, “You know, that’s not so strange. I was alive in eighteen-sixty five.”

:”How old are you?”

“I was born in 1852.”

“Shit, you’re old.”

“That was almost hurtful.”

“No,” Loreal said, “It’s just… I was kind of getting a thing for you. Which is stupid cause you’ve got a girlfriend. But you’re like…. Well, you’re over a hundred fifty years old. “

“I dress young.”

Loreal shook her head.

“So the being a blood drinking monster doesn’t get you. The being old gets you? That’s ageism I hope you know.”

“Okay, stop talking,” Loreal said, “because I didn’t even get through what I was going to tell you.’

“Oh, yeah. Your grandmother.”

“Yes,” Loreal said. “Apparently she was born before the American Revolution. Grandma was three hundred years old.”

“I can remember parts of it,” Lewis said. “when I am with Chris. He helps me to remember, but it is a faint memory.”

They were sitting in the great room of Susanna’s old house, and Owen was nodding.

“What can you remember?”

“Not the time,” Lewis said. “But the place. The woods, so many woods, and so many high trees. Deep valleys and so much beauty.”

“It was beautiful,” Chris said.

“But so much evil,” Lewis added. “And I was there to watch over the cast off people. The escaped slaves in the hills. The slaves who were still in the plantations. The white people even, who were ground into the earth by the feet of the rich, placed out of their lands. And even the Indians, who had their own medicine, their own magic, came to me. I remember I was learning things back then, reshaping what we already knew. We, the Clan, the family. The Clan was old, but our family was just beginning. I had students too. Cousins. They were family. Boys, young boys. I cannot put it all completely together right now.”

“But you could,” Owen said.

“Huh?”

“You could,” Owen said, sitting beside Seth. “It is said among us that there are several ways for life to return to this earth or remain in this world.”

Owen did not speak at once, and in the living room there had been a coffin for several days where now there was only a coffee table. They were on their way to a funeral mass for a casket full of bones, and so it seemed almost inappropriate to speak of this.

“There is, of course, the way of the blood drinker. And then there is the way of extended life, but that ends in death and the death is generally final. Then there is the method of tethering, vows and promises made by a soul that it will return to this world in due time to finish what it began. There are other ways, but those are the chiefest, and if it’s one you chose, and chose several times, then it is not for you to blunder about only remembering vaguely what happened in the past. The old life can be unlocked to you. All of them can be.”

“That’s right,” Chris said. “You spoke of it,” he turned to Lewis. “Or at least Malachy spoke of it. It was about your implements, the things of your house. The bowl you said, and the sword.”

“Yes,” Owen said. “It is by that ritual, the ritual of the sword and the bowl that your memories can be restored.”

“What would he do for that?” Chris leaned forward, but Seth waved it off and said, “Chris?”

“What?’

“Look at him,” Seth said, pointing to Lewis.

Chris did, and before Lewis could speak, Seth said, “He may not even be sure he wants those memories restored.”

“It is a thing, you know,” Lewis said, “to suddenly be strapped with a second and maybe a third and fourth life, to go from a memory that stretches back past my short life, and then goes all the way back to who knows how long. And we would have to see the Maid, and I have not seen her for some time.”

“And there is another thing,” Owen said.

“Which is?”

“The Sword is in my possession, because I am Master of the Clan, but the moment Lewis regains his memories, becomes his whole self, is the moment I cease to be the Master and he becomes Master once again.”

“Once he—” Chris started.

“For if he was Melek, and then he was Malachy, then he is Master of the Clan, and when those memories are restored, he must be Master again. That’s something to think about.”

“Yes,” Lewis said, standing up. “Well, it’s something to think about later and not at the moment. I can’t really think about it now. We have a funeral to get to anyway. We can discuss these things later.”