Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online

job at the dump. He was not young. The mother was narrow-faced, pointy-nosed, small and whipped. The girl you could hardly look at without breaking down, so pale and helpless that it gave resonance to the term “life support.” Suddenly the child’s mother took the notion that her dying daughter should be baptized. In her surprise and confusion Jo thought in a rather panic-stricken way about priests, ministers, any clergy who might be on duty. All at once she heard herself saying, “I can do that.”
    This was true according to canon law when there was no time for delay. And maybe there was a defiance in it for her—the male authority and so on. So with water from the bright steel black-and-white thermos jug beside the bed and the medical machinery, she did it. She poured the ice water over her hand and tried to hold it a second, warm it just a little. Three cups of the hand invisibly sheeted with ice shards, a viaticum, Father, Son, Spirit. And then the girl’s mother wanted the same, and Jo did it. To the child’s father, Jo said, “Sir?”
    It was absolutely not her business. It was a presuming intrusion, patronizing, diminishing. She thought he was feeling that as strongly as she was. He also knew, as did she, that he would not hold it together, that the sacrament would lay him down and out and break him in half. Which made it even more intrusive, and so she properly went away. Yet when she did, her heart was soaring. Any good at all, she thought. The hope of it even. Even the slim fancied appearance of an invisible notion was better than nothing, suggested some significance for naked pain. On the college shuttle bus back to her office she felt guilty and cried.
    At the top of the hill, a block or two from the hospital, four young Andeans were playing bamboo flutes. Jo had been vaguely aware of them for a few days and was used to the stratospheric pitch and spectral tunes, and to hearing them played around the campus. Three boys and a girl were busking there. Two of the boys wore tweed caps like old-fashioned British shepherds. The girl and the third boy wore beat-up fedoras. At their feet was a woven basket of the sort that was used all over the Americas for carrying fruit. These youths were not in costume—they were the real thing—Indians of the montaña. Watching them, Jo could almost place their valley, tucked into some high borderland, alternating the tropical and the alpine, speaking a language that was almost exclusive to that valley. All at once Jo realized that she could recognize the song they were playing. It was called “Sora,” a song all children knew and could sing in several versions. She did not know the meaning of the words, only that the song somehow concerned the Milky Way, which in some of the mountain languages was known as the Sea of Fat.
    Students had stopped to watch and listen, and a few took places among the Andean players. The music of the flutes was as hypnotic as it always had been. One flute, she noticed, was made of plastic instead of bamboo.
    Jo could vividly remember an occasion from her days in the mountains, children on the edge of a village where she was staying, singing “Sora” with voices as innocent and clear as fresh rain sounding in the broadleaf palms along the dry-season forest trails. After the children’s song the villagers were addressed by two men, an elderly white professor from the nearest provincial college and a local schoolteacher who spoke in the villagers’ language.
    What that experience had aroused in Jo Carr, then a young nun thousands of miles and so many years away, was fear and rage. Fear first, because she had mastered the local trails and her motorbike well enough to understand what was going on in the valley around her. The rage nourished itself afterward. In the montaña that evening she had assumed, as a listener, an expression of benign approval. People were watching her and she was very afraid. The people in the village crowd, she knew,