Song of Susannah

Have to get a clean shirt,Susa

Mia, daughter of none, made no reply. She clearly caredbupkes for shirts, clean or dirty. Mia was looking at the telephone. For the time being, with her labor on hold, the phone was all she cared about.

Now we palaver,Susa

Mia didn’t argue. Susa

How do we go there?Mia asked indifferently.

The black woman who was now two women (again) sat on one of the beds and folded her hands in her lap.Like on a sled, the woman’s Susa

I will,the other replied.Just don’t expect to like them. Or even understand them.

What do you—

Never mind! Gods, I never metanyonewho could ask so many questions! Time is short! When the telephone rings, our palaver ends! So if you’d palaver at all—

Susa

Here I go again,she thought. And:Eddie, I love you.

6th Stanza: The Castle Allure

All at once she was falling into her body again and the sensation provoked a memory of blinding brilliance: Odetta Holmes at sixteen, sitting on her bed in her slip, sitting in a brilliant bar of sun and pulling up a silk stocking. For the moment this memory held, she could smell White Shoulders perfume and Pond’s Beauty Bar, her mother’s soap and her mother’s borrowed perfume, so grown-up to be allowed perfume, and she thought:It’s the Spring Hop! I’m going with Nathan Freeman !

Then it was gone. The sweet smell of Pond’s soap was replaced by a clean and cold (but somehow dank) night breeze, and all that remained was that sense, so queer and perfect, of stretching into a new body as if it were a stocking one was pulling up over one’s calf and knee.

She opened her eyes. The wind gusted, blowing a fine grit in her face. She squinted against it, grimacing and raising an arm, as if she might have to ward off a blow.

“Over here!” a woman’s voice called. It wasn’t the voice Susa

She looked and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susa

She herself was legless again, and sitting in a kind of rude one-person cart. It had been parked at a notch in a low parapet wall. She looked out at the most fearsome, forbidding stretch of countryside she had ever seen in her life. Huge rock formations sawed at the sky and jostled into the distance. They glistened like alien bone beneath the glare of a savage sickle moon. Away from the glare of that lunar grin, a billion stars burned like hot ice. Amid the rocks with their broken edges and gaping crevices, a single narrow path wound into the distance. Looking at it, Susa

“Come to me now, if you’d come at all, Susa

Susa

(if he fascinates you and tells you to jump)

and she seized it as a tool, compressing it to an edge with which to cut through her frightened immobility. For a moment nothing happened, and then she threw herself backward so violently in the shabby little cart that she had to clutch the edge in order to keep herself from tumbling to the cobbles. The wind gusted again, blowing stone-dust and grit against her face and into her hair, seeming to mock her.

But that pull…fascination…glammer…whatever it had been, it was gone.

She looked at the dog-cart (so she thought it, whether that was the right name or not) and saw at once how it worked. Simple enough, too. With no mule to draw it,she was the mule. It was miles from the sweet, light little chair they’d found in Topeka, and light-years from being able to walk on the strong legs that had conveyed her from the little park to the hotel. God, she missed having legs. Missed it already.

But you made do.

She seized hold of the cart’s wooden wheels, strained, produced no movement, strained harder. Just as she was deciding she’d have to get out of the chair and hop-crawl her ignominious way to where Mia waited, the wheels turned with a groaning, oilless creak. She rumbled toward Mia, who was standing behind a squat stone pillar. There were a great many of these, marching away into the dark along a curve. Susa

Susa

She pushed the balky, gawky, protesting cart out of the wind and looked at the woman in the serape, ashamed to be so out of breath after moving less than a dozen yards but unable to help panting. She drew down deep breaths of the dank and somehow stony air. The pillars—she had an idea they were called merlons, or something like that—were on her right. On her left was a circular pool of darkness surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Across the way, two towers rose high above the outer wall, but one had been shattered, as if by lightning or some powerful explosive.