do, they lay low hugging the ground. They were several yards from the hospital building. The knotty trail they made among the macca was difficult to walk through. Nobody walked there. If a person wanted to urinate or make quick furtive love they stayed close against the side of the clinic, where the ground was smooth and baked. Only children hankering to eat the rich purple fruit that covered the branches in August ever went among the sea grapes.
But that was where the sound was coming from.
Rachel followed the cries until she caught sight of bright red cloth among the tangle. With sea spray in her eyes she thought at first there was a woman crouched on the ground. The woman, in a blue cambric dress, was shushing her baby as she struggled with one hand to release her breast to put in the baby's mouth, while with the other she hoisted up her skirt to piss.
Then Rachel's vision cleared and she saw that no woman except herself was there. She saw the basket with the baby's tiny legs kicking above the piece of scarlet cotton that had been tucked around him on both sides. She saw the milk-blue skin exposing the tracery of veins; the wisps of snow hair that later resolved itself into the famous two-toned bush, wild blond in front and jet black behind; the old man's wrinkled cheek that all newborns have, red with pain and rage as he screamed.
The left side of his face was hidden against the padding in the basket, which was in danger of stifling him. From his size and the timbre of his crying, Rachel, who had helped her mother raise eight children, could tell at once that the child was newborn. The basket had been padded with great care, it seemed in a pitiful effort to make him comfortable; it even had a bonnet-shaped canopy to shield him from the sun. But it had not shielded him from the line of black ants that were crawling over him and causing his cries.
Rachel ran the last few steps. Frantically she began brushing off the ants in the same motion with which she lifted the child out of the makeshift cradle. With savage instinct the baby snuffled against her breast, searching for the promise of comfort he was programmed to recognize before he even left the womb. He had been dressed in a small girl's bloomers and what looked like torn-off pieces of a red sheet, as though no preparation had been made for his birth. Swaddling cloths, Rachel thought, as the wide waistband of the panties shifted and she saw he was a boy.
The ants had begun to eat his foot, but even that pain had faded in the greater pain of his hunger as he snuffled for food. Not finding where to suckle, he began screaming again. Rachel rocked her body to and fro to quiet him, while turning the little face toward her, to see further what manner of child this could be.
What she saw of the rest of the face made her hide it in pity in her shawl.
There are moments in life when something, some object or vision or encounter, moves a person in the heart with such force that the future, that is to say one's way of looking at it, is changed forever. No course of action presents itself, and so, without condition, the heart surrenders; something irrevocable gives over. Such is the irresistible arrest. In the unique recognition of helplessness, the knowledge that there is nothing in the universe that could ever be done, no sphere of influence within which one has the power to act, we reach blindly for the familiar. For Rachel, the Yahwehist, when she saw the child's indescribable face, this was such a moment. (This she told me many years later, when she saw I finally understood that I had no power over him.)
And Rachel Fisher, a cursing woman in whom faith had the force of superstition, kneeled down on the ground there with the found child in her arms, and prayed.
The baby fell quiet. When she got up off her knees and looked at his face again, she smiled, a slow, astounded, beatific smile, and decided to say nothing to anyone about what had happened in that translucent moment when it became clear that she and the found child had been lifted, for an uncountable moment, out of time.
"Moses," she whispered. "Moshe." And again, "Moshe."
Then she added, as if in defiance of some objecting voice that only she heard, "Yu name Moshe, because I draw yu out of di water." As you can see, this account of how she found him was not accurate, but it was Rachel's account, the one that was told throughout Moshe's early life.
Rachel went back inside the hospital, entering from the front, an erect young woman with her hair demurely wrapped in a tie-head and her nylon dress that had got soaked through in the flying spray now chip-dry, floating softly around her hips. With the child cradled in the crook of her left arm, the basket in which she had found him hanging from the other, she was what she seemed: a decent woman, a real woman now, carrying her newborn child.
ii
News of the find spread like wildfire and people came to look and marvel.
For a town like Ora (the short name for Oracabessa-on-Sea) and a district like Tumela Gut, where the Fishers lived, the baby's parentage was never in question.
No one doubted that he was the product of serial fornications between one or other of the nubile black girlchildren who attended the high school, and one or other of the white man-teachers from Britain, married or unmarried, who did the "bad things" (tek wife from the barely fill-out girlchilds) in the undersea caves and hotel rooms on school trips for which certain girls were selected. Nobody ever claimed the child, and no girl was discovered to have been recently pregnant, though police investigations were carried out. After a while rumor went underground, though people did not forget, and so Moshe Fisher might have grown up in a normal way if his lineage had been the only abnormality about him.
But it wasn't. For one thing, there was the fact that he didn't look like his adopted parents. Rachel was part Indian, and fair, while Noah was pure African and very black of skin. For another, even in a society bred in mixture and anomaly, the child was not any color or physiognomy that allowed anyone to say what he was.
Moreover, his mother was Rachel Fisher, who was a staunch Yahwehist, a true believer. There was no Yahweh church in Jamaica at the time and there probably isn't now, but Rachel got her religion the way many poor people at the time got their reading material (Reader's Digest) and overseas education (Durham College correspondence courses)—by cutting out coupons from the Daily Gleaner and mailing them to addresses in England or Scotland or America, receiving in return unconscionable masses of pamphlets and other small literature.
According to Rachel's understanding, an understanding which like all understandings of foreign goods in Jamaica was only a version of the original (the meaning change always began in the passage across the sea), the essence of Yahweh (the religion, not the god) was that the Christian Bible had distorted the truths of God by translation. The force of Yahweh consisted in returning to the Hebrew pronunciations of words.
As a retranslation, young Moshe was a virtual cache of symbols.
To begin with, Rachel and Noah's childlessness took after Noah's family, not Rachel's: the Fishers were known to be a mainly barren family who never produced in any of their branches more than two offspring, more often one, and sometimes none at all. In the district of Tumela Gut, this was the sign of a curse. So, quite apart from his prophetic name, his advent as a gift to the desperate couple who had no child of their own made Moshe not only the fulfillment of a hope and a dream, but a hope and dream that would break the curse of the father's line.
With characteristic superstition, his mother insisted on inscribing in his name the mark of fertility—the maternal line. He was Rachel's talisman of the future, a future in which her name would never be wiped out. So, above the objections of his father, she named him, in full, Moshe Gid'on Rachel-Fisher. "Gid'on" was the Hebrew spelling of Giddion, her family surname on her mother's side; the apostrophe was to be pronounced like a short i to produce the same sound as the family name. "Rachel," the first part of Moshe's hyphenated surname, was to be
