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 red water would stain the clothes and so was used only to fill cattle troughs, but Foster-Reach River to the southeast, the river which if you tracked it to its head led you to the next district, Jericho, the place where it sprang up from underground. The districts were joined to each other in many such ways.
Rachel did her washing on Sunday mornings (Saturday was Yahweh's holy Sabbath). Sometimes other women came, balancing their wash pans on cottas on their heads. They washed in the river while their children played. They looked at Moshe curiously, and spoke openly of his deformity. Deformity did not seem to them something to be sensitive about, since the district was full of such. People with feet turned backward, the result of being pulled from the womb the wrong way with forceps. Men with hernias weighing more pounds than they could balance in their hands. A child with a cleft palate. A grown man with the brain of a child, young men who fell down in trances at the sound of excitable words, such as preaching, and foamed at the mouth until their jaws were pried and kept open by a metal spoon. Others who sought physical love with animals. Yet others who acquired a deformity from being taken away by unseen forces while young, and afterward returned.
The women prescribed remedies.
"Yu ever rub him down wid castor oil a night an put him in di shady sun a mornin? Dat can mek di skin come harden, yu know. Him won't look like dead croaking lizard so much, an him won't bruise so quick so much."
Rachel, looking up in alarm once this well-meaning and insensitive conversation began, breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that Moshe was out of earshot, paddling by himself along the river in search of crayfish, while the other children watched him with curiosity and wonder. But the fact that he could not hear what was being said did not make her any less angry.
The women were in full flow, not noticing her anger as she bent, tight-lipped, over her wash pan of clothes, rubbing them with Guinea Gold brown soap after beating them on the river rocks to get out the worst of the dirt.
"Yes, castor oil good, but not too much. Yu want to harden di skin, not mek it too dark. Yu can si seh him a Red Ibo, him jus a dundus one. If yu can tone down di dundus, mek di Red Ibo come out clear, wi bi good."
"Dis a nuh dundus. Dis a dundus double. Furthermore, dundus usually have two pink eye, nuh one blue an one brown. Some curse is on di child from di way him born. Down in Ora dem seh is retribution. Dat is how dem talk bout it, but mi nuh know. Yu carry him out yet, Rachel? You need fi bruk di curse, enuh. Carry him to Madda Penny."
"Or Bredda John. Bredda John can help him too. Him a myal man."
"Di hair funny too, ehn? But it can easy tek care of, more dan di skin. Yu can dye it one color. Tek out di dundus color in di front, mek it all black. Den him wi look like Indian, like coolie royal."
"True, but wha yu go do wid di picky-picky back part? It nuh match up." The woman who said this made a face, and added comically, "No coolie royal hair nuh look like dat under di sun." You cannot fix the nigger half. It will always be mismatched.
The women laughed at this
