The Realm of Secondhand Souls

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Chapter One

Souls

Novena was born just as her name would have you picture: surrounded by a halo of candles and eight praying women. It was a hot, still summer night and the hum of prayers sounded like a swarm of cicadas, the buzz that surrounds lawn mowers and tall glasses beaded with sweat.

They were far from lawn mowers, being in the middle of the city, in an ancient apartment that resented the modern age and mournfully released memories of its former glory like a vapor through its rooms: a lingering trace of cigar smoke in deep green drapes, a brief flash of the corner of a rose-colored plush velvet sofa, the ghost of a man in a hat reading the newspapers.

In the bedroom, her about-to-be aunt Quivera was everywhere, fetching ice and blankets, mopping her sister's face, as much in help as in the constant activity of anxiety. Of Catorza's two sisters, Quivera was the practical, antiseptic one, and found the ordeal of birth painful to witness. So much blood. So much mess, and impossible to control. So much heaving and screaming from Catorza, who seemed to be expelling all of her insides. Still, for all the mess, Novena would end up sliding out quietly, almost gracefully, and manage to retain the ability to stay quiet in the midst of chaos until much later in her life.

The other women around the bedside included Catorza's other sister, Elegia, who was praying particularly hard since she thought herself the only sister among them strong enough to withstand the rigors of birth, a stamina she had put to constant practice.

The midwife, Celantra, an old family friend, was called upon wheneverthe services of a voodoo, healer, or guide were needed, although you needed to occasionally remind her what role the particular moment required, since she was known to bring forceps when a live chicken was more in order, and vice versa. At this moment, she was pawing through a large satchel, trying to remember what she was looking for. Jakarta, a neighbor who traveled up and down the coast performing in small blues clubs as part of a trio, had just arrived with the other two members of her trio for whatever musical accompaniment the night might require.

Fanning herself furiously in the corner was Margita, Catorza's best friend, a worldly but easily rattled woman who had come by train from a distant city. And finally there was a great-aunt, Annaluna, the only black-veil-wearer among them. She was the one who led the prayers. She was the one who knew all the words, the spotty knowledge of the rest of the women contributing in no small part to the humming sound of their incantations: they were doing a holy version of mouthing the lyrics and humming the melody. Their pinpricks of guilt over the long-forgotten words accounted for the fervor with which they delivered what fragments of prayers they could conjure. Occasionally, Jakarta and her trio would break out of prayer and into actual song, creating a kind of sanctified scatting: Our father. Bap bap bap bee boo. Diddlieopti doo. Deliver us from evil. Da wan. Da wan. Amen.

Annaluna threw them occasional sharp glances, but there was a kind of soothing logic to the music, from which Catorza took some comfort.

Hours rolled by in a salty, undulating tide which had seeped into the room and taken over: screams and pain, calm and breath, heat and dampness. There wasn't a woman in the room who wasn't used to being pulled by rhythmic tidal forces, and on this night they gave themselves up to it. Time was left to sit quietly in the corner, called upon only in short bursts when Catorza's contractions needed measuring.

It was hot, and everyone was sweating. The women had stripped down to their underwear-even Annaluna, whose corset was immense and proud and somehow military in the face of the more dainty, slippery things worn by the younger women. Their dresses formed an airy bundle of color on the floor. When Novena's head finally appeared, Quivera was at the bedside, and in her excitement she bent and grabbed the dress on top of the bundle to wrap her in. It was a cobalt silk owned by Margita, a big, fleshy blonde, who for all her sophisticated flash was the shyest among them and had been the last to peel out of her clothes.

When Margita saw her dress swaddling the bloody, mucus-covered bundle of baby, she started to protest. "Quivera, my . . . Oh," she gulped, then turned to the others and shrugged.

"Oh well. It was on sale. Loehmann's." Then she brightened, as the train of her thought moved her from disaster to optimism, a trip she took at least twenty times a day, every degree of which registered on her face. This was what Catorza had always admired most in her.

Now Margita brightened further and said, "Hey, it's luck, isn't it. It'll be my lucky dress from now on. I'll save it for her. She can wear it herself, in sixteen years."

The women had crowded around the bed. Their warm, damp skin stuck to each other. The smell of blood and salt and sweetness, acrid and new, the sounds of their clucking and cooing, their mouths opening and closing like birds, stirred in each of them the sensation of themselves being born.

Catorza, looking down at Novena swaddled in blue, felt a great swell inside her, like the ocean's wave. It rolled in, heavy and wet, built to a gentle crest, then crashed home. As it receded, she knew herself to be different; it was her first moment of motherhood. She became fixed on a picture of Novena at sixteen years, ripe and seductive as she herself had been. Fingering the silk, she looked up and said, "Twenty-one years. And not a minute before." Novena felt her own small wave cresting and relaxing. She took in the claw-footed sofa, the pile of dresses, the corset of Annaluna, the echoes of the trio's songs, the notes of which were lingering in the corners of the room like cobwebs, and she felt her mother's warm fingers through the blue silk. She looked up at them all and smiled at how familiar it seemed.

Drop an egg into boiling water and the shell will often crack, releasing its albumen in lacy white streams. The same thing happens to a man's heart when he becomes a father: it develops tiny fissures that release the tendrils that tie him to his children. Some men's hearts, though, will stay intact and contained, the threads of protein becoming choked and tangled up in themselves. The children of those fathers usually grow up with similar hearts. They grow up loving solitude with a fierceness that even the best mothers can't alter.

Novena's father, Nick, wasn't a bad man, just a bad father, although like all bad fathers he would never have believed this. And like many bad fathers, he had a multitude of children. Long before he met Catorza, he had married young and his wife had borne him four children in rapid succession, so quickly that by the time he was in his mid-twenties he was already stunned by life. His children confused him, made noises he couldn't understand and demands he couldn't fathom. He wasn't sure what they wanted, but it seemed to be everything. Worse, they showed no signs of giving him anything in return.

"What about me?" he'd yell through the house. "When is it my turn?" and the children would grow still. Even in their baby brains, they knew that to hear these questions from a parent doomed them to become people who would forever try too hard to please. The thought that he'd been cheated, that he was going to end up empty-handed, gnawed at Nick until one day he stopped going home. He sent money when he could, which wasn't often. He was a musician, which suited him in many ways, but was hardly lucrative enough to support a family.

He met Catorza not long after he'd left, one night when she came to see Jakarta and her trio sing at a small downtown club. Nick was sitting in on piano and saw her sitting at a small table watching him. She liked his big hands; he liked the fact she could sit so calmly at a table by herself. There was a stillness about her that gave him a feeling like homesickness. All he wanted, he told himself, was what was coming to him. Nothing more than what he was entitled to. And Catorza took that shape for him, sitting there calmly in the dark club, watching him. Here was someone who would pay attention to him for a change.

Which she did, for a while. Until the ironic and cynical gods that cursed Nick with fecundity found him again. By the time Novena arrived, he was gone, nothing more than one of the ghosts inhabiting the apartment.

With a new baby, Catorza needed work she could do from home, and began gathering up jobs and taking them in as if they were stray pets. She started typing, mostly immigration documents for a lawyer who had opened a storefront office in the building to capitalize on the hundreds of Vietnamese who were moving into the neighborhood. She did their taxes and helped them improve their rough English so they could start their businesses, teaching them useful phrases like "Thank you, come again" and "Cash or charge?" and, for the women opening nail salons all across the city, "Go pick a color." They stopped going to the lawyer and began coming to her. She started balancing their books, and straightening out their immigration problems, and advising them on the best way to deal with officials. They thought there was nothing she couldn't fix, and she had to convince them to take their sick children and broken appliances elsewhere. They kept coming, some paying her in cash, some with steaming pots of fragrant dishes or boxes of tea, and some with bright bolts of cloth, which she hung in panels around Novena's crib. Novena would lie for hours, watching the play of breeze and light through them.

One day, Xa Ngum, a neighborhood elder, showed up with a daunting stack of letters from the IRS that needed deciphering, and a basket of shirts that needed mending and ironing. Catorza tried to say no to the shirts, but he pretended not to understand and left the basket behind, bowing to her as he went out the door.

She let them sit for a few nights, but the fact was, she found ironing soothing. So one night she took out her iron and lifted a shirt from the basket. The cloth was ancient and beautiful, and it seemed alive under her fingers. As she pressed the hot iron to the shirts, their fragrant breaths were exhaled into the clouds of steam which wrapped around her. With each shirt she pressed, the breaths of the cloth grew stronger, until it seemed as if the shirts were whispering to her. As she mended and pressed, the shirts told her of Xa Ngum's work in the hot wet government offices of the capital, of his escape from invaders through moist rice fields and slow brown rivers. With the next shirt, she saw a green so translucent it nearly blinded her. A green shattering into a thousand greens, the green of parrot, snakes, emeralds, of melon, jade, and new grass. By the time the last shirt was pressed and folded, she sat down, feeling a little drunk.

Xa Ngum showed up a few days later and was delighted with the neat stacks of shirts, which Catorza had bundled and tied with ribbon, like packets of love letters. He began showing up every Wednesday with new piles of shirts. Since he still wore the drab anonymous clothes of the city, she wondered what he did with the shirts, but what did it matter? He paid her well.

Xa Ngum loved Catorza's apartment, especially when the ghosts of its past life wafted through the rooms like sleepwalkers. Mostly, he loved sitting watching her work, a sight he found both soothing and exciting. He would hold Novena in his lap, a cup of green tea by his side, and they would fall asleep to the steady ticking of the sewing machine; the whooshing blast of steam from the iron mingling with the fragrant fumes of the tea would lull them into dreams of warmth and industry.

One night Xa Ngum didn't go home. Catorza welcomed the company of someone in her bed, where he became a young man, by turns ardent and giggling. She began to count on their Wednesday nights.

Months of pleasure and ironing passed. Then, two Wednesdays went by with no Xa Ngum. Catorza felt shy about calling him. She sat with the last batch of his shirts and unwrapped the bundle, inhaling the shirts, hoping to find an answer. But the cloth was silent, having expelled all its secrets under the press of the iron.

The next morning, Xang, one of the neighborhood women, showed up with a note from Ngum, which she offered to translate in exchange for Catorza typing up a stack of liquor permit documents. She insisted the typing be done first. Catorza, not expecting good news, typed slowly. Then she gathered Novena on her lap and Xang opened the letter.

"'Beautiful iron woman,'" she read. "'I must go for a while and be with my family.'" Xang was an old friend of Ngum's and was jealous of Catorza and scandalized by their carrying on. She interrupted her reading to tell her, "His family still in Vietnam. His wife was very beautiful. She's dead now."

Xang continued to read. "'My son and nephew have been tempted by evil to join the army here, which has returned to killing. This is the army that destroyed us a long time ago. My sister mourns. My family is a field of dry grass that is burning under a too hot sun. I must put out the flames. I ask Xang to take this immediately to you'"-here Xang blushed, since she had deliberately waited two weeks before taking it to Catorza-"'to let you know I will come back one day.'" Catorza knew he wouldn't return. As she stroked Novena's hair, she suddenly felt queasy. Something moved in the pit of her stomach like a snake. Xang grabbed her chin suddenly and looked into her eyes for a long moment.

"You be careful," she said sternly. Catorza tipped her face up in a question. "You have something coming," she told Catorza, and quickly gathering up her liquor permits, went out the door.

Ngum, that silly old fool, Xang thought, going down the stairs. She wouldn't tell him. Let him find out for himself.

And so nearly four years after Novena's birth, Catorza was pregnant again. When her time came, she went to the hospital to deliver. Margita, who couldn't get away, sent her a new dress, in what she hoped would become a tradition of stylish receiving blankets. It arrived in a big box from one of the better department stores, swaddled in great mounds of tissue paper. Also in the box were matching shoes and a purse, both in a gay floral print. Their actual purpose in the birthing process Margita hadn't quite thought through, but they matched the dress so perfectly she couldn't resist. Annaluna didn't trust shoes. In fact, she thought they had the capacity for making their own decisions to conspire against us, and believed they were rendered powerless only if they were on feet or corralled in closets. Her rules were simple:

"Never leave them in hallways; there they can congregate and plot amongst themselves. Never leave them outside, unaccompanied, for they can wander where you don't want them to be. If you see two shoes lying together, imagine the worst."

If she found a shoe in the middle of the sidewalk, which in the city is a not uncommon occurrence, she would bring it home and bury it. Usually they were sneakers, which she considered containers of misfortune rather than instruments of determined evil, unless a pair of them were tied and hanging off a telephone wire, a clear warning that the street had been hexed and was to be avoided. Occasionally, though, she would come home muttering darkly, holding a man's smashed oxford or a woman's bruised high heel, which she had fished out of a gutter amid broken glass and old newspaper. These she would not only bury, but light candles for for three days.

If she had been there when Margita's box arrived, she would have forbidden the shoes from going to the hospital, which as far as she was concerned was like letting the devil vacation in purgatory. A hospital was dangerous enough, but to bring shoes to it could mean nothing good.

She was right. Catorza, in the first few hours of labor, had opened the box, and put the purse and shoes on the nightstand next to her to admire them. A few hours later, when she started giving birth, things took a bad turn. She started bleeding too heavily. The hospital was understaffed, the intern was inexperienced, and when he realized he was losing her called not for another doctor, but for the priest. The priest arrived with two nuns, who huddled near the intern and, sizing up the seriousness of the situation, directed that the mother be sacrificed to save the baby. Catorza fought, but wouldn't stop bleeding. Rivers of blood flowed from her. But unlike the slow brown rivers of Xa Ngum's escape, this red river moved fast and hard. It bathed the room, spattering the white wimples of the nuns and the starched collar of the priest.

The strong current of this river carried an infant boy, who bobbed and fought for breath as he was pulled and dragged along from his nest. The first breath he took was Catorza's last.

He was alive and his prognosis was good. A baby without a mother, though, has the right to choose otherwise. An hour later, exhausted from his efforts to punch his way into the world, lonely beyond description, he had a final lingering thought of his sister. Then he stopped breathing and joined his mother.

Quivera, Elegia, and Annaluna were in the waiting room, holding each other's hands as they waited for word. When the blood-spattered priest came and told them the news of Catorza's death, they let out a collective wail that shattered the air. They wailed without stopping until an hour later the bad news of the boy was announced. Then they fainted, one by one. As their bodies fell to the floor, their jewelry unclipped, unsnapped, unpinned itself and fell off them, their shoes slid off their feet, their pocketbooks flew across the room. It was as if the pieces of themselves that would now be forever lost without Catorza took shape and fell from them, landing in sad little piles on the hard floor.

Annaluna gathered up the murdering shoes and purse to take home, and vowed to never again speak to Margita. She sat at her kitchen table that night and wept the remainder of the tears she had been allowed in this life. She had spent half of them when her own sister, Catorza's mother, had died. She released a slightly smaller portion of them when she lost her husband, whom she had lost not to death, which would have accounted for considerably fewer tears, but to another woman. Those were the powerful armies of tears; the smaller regiments of everyday hardships, wounds, and sentiment had been exhausted by the time she reached sixty. Now the tears over the loss of Catorza and the baby marched forth freely, leaving in their wake a garden of sodden discarded tissues that covered the table like wild roses. After a time, she was finally wrung out, the last reserves of moisture gone, her insides coated with sand and dust.

At midnight, she got up and put the purse and the shoes-safely imprisoned in a box-on the table, considering the dilemma of what to do with them. She considered purses benign, at worst selfish, with a capacity for good that they rarely exerted. She sat, her hand absently opening and closing the clasp on the purse, muttering her options, in a scatting stream reminiscent of Jakarta's trio.

"Mail them back to that wicked . . . no mail, anything can . . . cut them up. Cut them up. Burn. Bury. Too good for 'em."

Suddenly, the idea of disarming the shoes' power receded, and the idea of punishing them started to burn in her. It was a flame that spread quickly through her arid, rainless bones.

As anyone who has tried knows, the punishment of objects is a complex and deceptive science. For example, physical abuse brings only temporary satisfaction: the mute and damaged thing often just lies there, mocking in its lack of remorse, egging you on to further outrage, further violence. The attempt to teach an offending object a lesson with drastic measures like cutting, scarring, or burning doubles its insult to you, as you are left with the scarred, burned, and useless thing. Annaluna, in her intense fury, rejected these options and arrived at the only workable plan of punishing the shoes.

The funeral home was crowded. The first row of chairs was taken up by Quivera, Elegia, and Novena, with an empty chair for Annaluna.

Behind them sat Jakarta; collapsed next to her was the midwife, Celantra, who had thankfully remembered to leave in the car the clumps of sage that she had mistakenly brought with her. The burning-sage ritual was for new houses, to drive out the spir-its; there was not enough sage in the world to cover a funeral home. Margita was still in transit.

Novena sat quietly in the metal bamboo funeral home chair, watching her mother sleep a few feet away. A memory stirred, of her mother in bed, of these women surrounding her, of tears and dampness and screams and breathing. Now she heard again the humming drone of incantation.

"Oh Novena, oh Novena," they wept to her, picking her up, holding her in their laps, rocking with her, grieving, using her as a human handkerchief, her calm presence in their laps unleashing fresh sobs and tears.

Jakarta stood to sing. She started with some low, soft hymns until her voice, cracked in sorrow, finally refused to go on. She pulled out her harmonica and moved on to blues, the old-as-dirt kind. She was in the middle of "Motherless Children" when Annaluna arrived.

Annaluna was stooped in her grief, but at the same time seemed taller. She limped to the front of the room, where she stood at Catorza's coffin. She touched her niece's cheek. As she prayed, Quivera nudged Elegia, who looked at Annaluna and let out a little bleating cry that harmonized perfectly with the harmonica's solo moans.

Annaluna had turned and hobbled toward a chair. She was moving as if her feet were bandaged. In a strange way, they were. On her feet were the gaily patterned shoes. They were impossibly large on her tiny feet, but to compensate, she had stuffed the spaces with mounds of her tear-soaked tissues that had collected on her kitchen table the night before.

"Annaluna. What have you done to your feet?" cried Elegia. Annaluna stopped and stared hard at Elegia as if she didn't recognize her. Finally she spoke.

"You see these shoes? These shoes killed Catorza. And now I am going to return the favor," she said. "I walked here in them, and I am going to walk in them until they no longer exist. If it means I must be buried in them, then bury me in them."

Then she sat down, and someone handed her Novena. Annaluna sat with the child on her lap. Annaluna was calm and dry-eyed, but for one moment wished she had a small reserve of tears left, because it had been a long and painful walk to the funeral home, and her feet were starting to kill her.