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Beyond Molasses Creek

Thomas Nelson

Chapter One

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina Ally

There's a bend in the creek where marsh grass waves, calling egrets and ospreys from their high places. It's as familiar to me as the bend in my elbow, yet now, years later, it almost seems exotic. Standing here, I can't look at the creek and not see them all—the Ganges, the Seine, the Baghmati—all the beautiful rivers that have carved valleys into my soul.

I'm home now, Huck on the Mississippi, winding my way, finding my way home.

Why did someone have to die for me to come back? I wonder. Isn't it just as glorious and miraculous a waterway as any other?

I am sitting Indian-style in my stone garden, at least it will be after I'm done with it. Right now, it's just a patch of grass in Daddy's yard. It's overgrown, wild and empty at the same time. Much like my heart. I close my eyes. I can see them all around me, the statues I've collected over the years. I'll put them all over this yard and create my own Garden of Dreams. It was the last place I was truly happy. A faraway garden. Stone statues. True love. Daddy would understand. If I'm going to stay here for any time at all, I'll have to do things my way, and right now, I feel destitute. I need someone to carve a god of peace for me, something I can touch and hold, something to take away this awful, gnawing grief.

I am too old to be sitting on the ground in the middle of the yard. The neighbors will think I've gone batty. I push to standing and wipe off my ample rear. I head to the dock and breathe in the salty marsh air. I see a rope hanging off the edge and disappearing into the water. Daddy's crab trap. I breathe in deep and exhale. Tears spring to my eyes and I fight them off.

Crabs. I'm hungry. Is it possible I'm hungry after eating a whole rotisserie chicken with coleslaw on the side? I look down at my ripply thighs. The sunlight this time of day does a number on me, pulls out every little bulge and pocket, every wrinkle. I will miss my father, I will, but I do not miss shorts weather in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Some people are not made to wear shorts. I struggled through it in Bali and on the shores of Hawaii, but only because I did not know a soul there. Here? Here, there's a slew of people who've never even left this place and know the old me from long ago. Can you imagine? Can you even imagine never wanting to see the world, to partake in it all? To find your place in it?

I pull up the trap to see if anything is in there. Of course, there's not.

"Give it time."

A voice like butter rolls down my back.

I drop the trap with a splash and nearly fall into the water. Clutching the pole, I turn around and realize the sun is beaming off my flabby arms. And there he is. There he is. Just look at him. Is it possible black people don't age the way we do?

"Dad-gum, Vesey. Scared me half to death!"

"Sorry, Miss Ally. Here, lemme help you up."

He reaches for me, a long, strong, sinewy arm with forearm muscles rippling. I feel faint. This is Vesey, Ally Green. The boy you played with when you were little, the one who was off limits because you are white and he is not. Vesey Washington. This is the South and always will be. Remember that.

"Thank you, I'm ... I'm fine," I say. "Just been a long day. What with the ... well, coming home and all."

His face breaks out into a grin, not a sly one, but a genuine, heartfelt smile with teeth so white, I'm feeling dizzy again. Reminds me of the white sands in Fiji, so pure.

"You are a sight for sore eyes, Mr. Washington. You still climbing trees or something?"

"Or somethin'. Look here, just come over to see if there was anythin' you needed from me. I been checkin' on him, Doc Green, every day for a good while. Hard to break the habit." He looks down at the cracks in the pier, then off into the sunset behind me. "I'm real sorry ... a good man, he was. Good man."

"Thank you. Yes, he was." I turn around and face the sunset too. In a minute it will be gone, just a memory, like Daddy. The red meets the greens of the trees, and the yellows and oranges fan out to pinks and purples, and yes, this is one of the most spectacular sunsets in the world. In fact, wherever the sun sets is where I want to be. So tonight I want to be right here, on this dock, with Daddy's house behind me and Vesey just feet away. We watch the sky silently for about thirty seconds, and then the sun dips behind the trees and it's gone for another day.

I am suddenly aware of the hideousness of the backs of my legs and turn around quickly. Is it possible he's standing closer? I swear I can feel his heat. He's close to sixty now, my age, and I'm hoping that means his eyes aren't as good as they used to be. Perhaps he can't see me well, and all my ripples and wrinkles smooth out nicely. Yes, I'm sure that's it.

"You look tired, Miss Ally. You feelin' all right?"

"Vesey Washington, never, ever tell a woman she looks tired. You hear me?"

"I didn't mean no—"

"I am tired. Very tired. My daddy just died. I just came halfway across the world for his funeral and to clean out his old house on the creek, and at the moment, yes, I am exhausted. There's much to do. Did you see the inside of that place? It's like a museum. Looks like he's never moved a thing in the twenty years Mama's been gone."

Vesey looks in my eyes and I can tell I've frightened him from saying anything at all.

I smile and move closer to him. I lean up on my tiptoes and put my hands on his firm shoulders. I press myself to his stiff chest and breathe in the smell. How long has it been? This man could be Molasses Creek itself, the salt, the pluff mud, the snails on tall grass, the fish jumping in hot sun. With my eyes closed, my mind erases the years and takes me to a cool evening on this very creek. I can hear music playing and see moonlight dancing on his face. I imagine his tender lips on mine ... then I pull myself together and away from him. I smooth my hair. "It's good to see you, Vesey. Thank you for being here ... for Daddy."

Vesey grabs his hat and backs away. "I'll be just over there, 'cross the water, if you need me. All you got to do is holler."

All I have to do is holler.

I nod and he walks away from me, a slow, limber pace that's carried him surely for six decades. He doesn't wear shorts. Never has. I do not know how he handles this Lowcountry heat in long pants. There are some things so different about us. The color of our skin. The desires of our souls. I could never have stayed in the same place my whole life and been content with it, yet he is. Or so he seems to be.

I watch as he steps gingerly into his fishing boat. It creaks and rolls with his weight, but he steadies it. Always steady, that's Vesey. He nods my way and I wave a tiny, pathetic wave as the water parts for him to cross over like Moses, back to his side of the creek. He looks so natural in that old boat. I feel like a fish out of water here. There are so many walls and layers of difference between us, like honey-drenched Greek baklava. We may have known each other as children, but now, what do we really know of one another? We're as opposite as night and day.

But maybe now we'll have the time to learn each other all over again. I push the thought away and shake my head. Ally Green, what to do with you? You're not here for Vesey. You're here because your daddy is dead.

I walk back into Daddy's musty house and throw open all the windows as fast as I can. I've got to air this place out. I've got to let Daddy's spirit free, let the memories of me when I was a child loose to run around in this place. I am such a different person from who I once was. I think it's good. No, I can't think about it at all. I'm tired. Tomorrow will be a new day and I'll be able to clean this place out and start to make it mine. Daddy wanted me to have this lazy spot on the river ... why? He knows I don't like to stay put. Knew it, anyway. But I'll honor him. I loved him. I still do. I'll pretend I've inherited some exotic place on the Nile and I've got to make my way, learn to eat the native food, learn to talk like them, to fit in. Deep down, I know in three months I'll be done with Charleston, itching to leave again, but for now, I will do this for him. For Daddy.

The rain comes on with thunder and lightning, and a storm suits me fine right now. I think about Daddy, how he lay on this very bed. I can smell him here in this house, on these sheets. I turn out the lights. Strangely, it's not my father I'm thinking of, but Vesey on the other side of the water, how much distance there is between us. I think of the lines in his face, how I'd love to draw them again. But I can't. How I wish someone would bring chisel to stone and carve him for my garden so I could look at him and touch him anytime I want. I close my eyes. I am sketching again in my mind, and as my head hits the pillow to sleep in a place I once called home, it's Vesey's face I see before me. Vesey. Molasses Creek. My destiny.

Chapter Two

Kathmandu, Nepal Sunila

There are stories of my birth in which a large white bird swooped down close enough to the earth to drop me in a betel nut tree. Sometimes I picture long wings flowing, flapping, and me, carefully wrapped in gold cloth, a descendant of the heavens. Perhaps it was a great egret or eagle with sharp talons. Perhaps the aim was to leave me at a royal palace, but the winged beast was attacked in midair and did only what it could do—it dropped me here.

Amaa tells me my skin was once the color of the tops of the mountains of Nepal. She says I was born of snow and carried in a bird's beak until swallowed and passed out through the creature, flung into the filth of the streets of Kathmandu.

Buba thinks I'm a curse. He blames me for the squalor we live in, for the stones we must carry and break, but he was born into this life a Dalit. He was cursed at his first breath. He is jealous because I was a master carver of stone at twelve years old and could sit under my umbrella to do my work, while he and the others baked in the hot sun.

My skin is now the color of terra-cotta. I spent days blistered and oozing, the dust of gravel filling my sores. Later I was given an umbrella to work under, chisel in hand. They used to show me what I was to depict in my stones. I am remembering a fat child with wings that come off her back. She was called angel.

There was a book once with pictures of gods and mythical creatures, beings that come from the heavens. I studied the pictures and could not turn away, could barely blink. I drank in the pages with my eyes as if dying of thirst and buried them deep in a well inside me.

My eyes are blue, the color of the sky. To me it is a sign that I am surely from the gods that I carve. Perhaps I, too, am made of stone and the lines I cut, the facial features, the arms and legs of goddesses and angels—perhaps I will cut just the right stone and when I look, I will see myself there—it will be myself I have set free with my chisel.

For the past twenty-five years, I have longed to see the Book of the Gods again. I know where it is kept—in the big office of the cruel man. I have seen him leave a child to suffer the pain of a broken foot from dropping a heavy stone. I have seen him turn away when another has coughed up blood from years of dust. The book may as well have been tossed in the seas, lost forever. In the quarry, they would let me learn as much as they wanted me to know and nothing more. Yet I would dream.

Someday, I would reach this book. I would steal it and study it. I would open the pages and the gods would open my eyes and make me understand the letters and markings that I could not read before. With my eyes wide open I would understand how to return to my true home, to fly on the great white wings again, up into the blue sky and out of the quarry. Out of this life and into the better next.

It is happening to me now.

The man before me is no longer breathing. His face is covered in dust from the gravel and stone that have been tracked into his office year after year. I am glad he is dead. This feeling should scare me, but there is little fear left anymore, only a dream coming true.

How many nights have I lain on the hard ground just outside these walls and dreamed of the day when I would be in this office, not for his cruelty, but to search for the Book of the Gods? I lift my feet and walk around the body. I must work quickly. I lean down and reach for the keys around his waist and fear grips me. What if this is all a trick? What if he isn't dead at all? He will kill me.

No. He is gone. Look. See how still he is? My hand trembles as I touch the keys. I keep my eyes on his face and then look to the door to be sure no one is coming. I can hear the children yelling outside and hear the pounding of chisels and hammers on rock. The keys are in hand. I stand, straightening my sari, and move to the cabinet. I try each key, one after the other after the other, my heart racing, and finally, the lock turns. The cabinet opens. My heart spills over and in a flood I see them all—the birds, the gods, the water, the reeds, the man, the woman, my own fate.

I grab the Book of the Gods and stuff it in my cholo. I clutch it to my chest and hurry away from the dead man. He can be cruel no more. He can hold me here no longer. He cannot keep me from my destiny. I rush out of the office and the sky opens up. Rain drenches the back of my head as I struggle to keep the book dry at my chest. It is my only hope, this book.

I push my calloused hands through the tarp and lean into our ragged tent. My mother is there. She is trying to wash a metal cup with the fresh water from the sky.

"Amaa," I say. She turns to me, years of misery drawn across her face. "He is dead, Amaa. He is finally dead."

"Your father? Buba?" Her eyes glisten.

"No," I say. I kneel down on the ground before her and move my face close to hers. "The cruel man, Amaa. The cruel man is dead. We are free. Look." I pull out the Book of the Gods, and Amaa drops her metal cup in the dust. I dare to smile. "The Book of the Gods," I whisper. "I have it now. I have dreamed of this day."

"Yes," says Amaa. "It has come. I have always known this day would come." Her face turns still as stone, and I watch her chest to be sure she is still breathing.

Chapter Three

Mount Pleasant Ally

I wake up gasping for air. Where am I?

I once woke up in Ghana beneath a mosquito net, looked down by my feet, and found myself face-to-face with the sobering eyes of a king cobra. I didn't breathe for a full sixty seconds until it slithered away from the cot and some natives chopped its head off outside my door. I startle at the memory, not sure where I am. It's a hazard of traveling so much. You're never quite sure where you've laid your head.

I open my eyes in the dim light and smell the dampness of Daddy's house, the mustiness of his carpet. I remember now. He's gone. I look to the foot of the bed and see yellow eyes staring back at me. My heart lurches, but it's only Katmandu, or Kat, as I call him, Daddy's beloved Maine Coon. I've never seen anyone so babied in all my life. Daddy would have done well to have a grandchild to hold and to raise up, but life stole that joy away from us, didn't it? I've got to breathe. Breathe, Ally.

I've had that dream again.

For thirty something years I've had the same dream—of an elephant and a great white bird. Now, I know there are no elephants in the Low country of South Carolina, but I have seen them in my travels. And in this dream, there's this big gray elephant on a riverbank, wanting to cross over. The water is not wide or deep but the fella just stands there, unable to, something holding it back.

Another elephant comes on the other side and tries to pull the first one over by wrapping trunks. But as much as the one pulls, the other one pulls harder, and a great tug-of-war commences. Back and forth it goes, on and on and on. A war of wills. It saddens me to watch it, the two of them getting nowhere.

And then there is this great white bird that flies down and lands on the back of the first elephant. With this bird on his back, somehow the elephant is different. He doesn't feel the need to pull back anymore. Against his nature, he allows himself to be pulled for the first time and, lo and behold, crosses over that river.

The strangest thing is how that white bird sits so calmly on the elephant's back, not flapping its wings or pecking or pestering it at all. Instead, it is majestic in its great white stillness, and just by being there somehow soothes the animal, coaxes it silently to the other side.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Beyond Molasses Creek by Nicole Seitz Copyright © 2012 by Nicole Seitz. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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