The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

cave by the river had told them to do, advising them that this was the sure way of frightening bad spirits).
    But none of it worked. She had become a zombie—the living dead. Agatha’s mother was inconsolable.
    “When I find that dutty bwoy who do this evil unto my daughter, him owna sister, I going to kill him! With my own two hands I going to kill him.”
    Her mother took time off from the sugar factory where she worked. She stayed at home and held Agatha in her big hands and sang to her: “Come back, Gatha. Come back yah. Water come a mi eye. Come back, Gatha. Come back yah. Water come a mi eye.”
    And maybe what the obeah man, and the myal woman, and the brother-man who lived in the cave by the river had not bothered to say, but which everyone knew, was true—that there were some things, some evils, some curses in this world, that will take either three, or seven, or nine days to cure. For it was on the seventh day of her mother’s song that Agatha finally relaxed in her embrace and the fear that had prevented her eyelids from descending finally lifted.
    Some of the damage, however, was deeper and could not be cured. She was now able to blink; she could close her eyes whenever she wanted, but the ability to fall asleep had been lost. Agatha would lie on her cot each night only to please her mother. She would close her eyes and breathe deeply. But she never truly drifted into sleep. She was acutely conscious of every passing minute, every second that ticked away, and in this way she began to learn the exact sounds of darkness, the precise measure of night. She knew what belonged where and when. So if she heard, for instance, a particular flutter of wings in the daytime, she would look up startled and ask of the creature, Mr. Rat-bat, what are you doing up at this time? This is not your hour.
    For eighty years Agatha Lazarus had lived in this somniphobic state. Life had been one everlasting day. And then there came a strange moment in 1941.
    She had been in the middle of complaining to Monsignor Dennis, explaining to him that they were out of sugar, out of rice, out of antiseptic, but most humiliatingly, out of tissue. She said that she didn’t understand why they had to be completely out of things before they could be replaced, and that furthermore … And then she stopped, in mid-flow. She had suddenly become aware of a new sensation in her body. A deep scowl clouded her face and even Monsignor Dennis asked whether she was all right. She nodded her head and said yes, yes, she was fine and continued with her protests. But it was from that moment on that she became slightly distracted. This new sensation was curious. What she felt was a slight tingling in one of her little fingers. It lasted for two days and then, instead of disappearing, it jumped straight across her body to the other little finger. It was as if a swarm of tiny insects were buzzing inside those two digits. The insects began to grow in number and to move out. Some migrated to the other fingers, her thumbs, and soon her entire hand was tingling. Eventually they traveled farther, across her shoulders, up to her neck, then to her face, where they seemed to be most particularly drawn to her eyelids. They stayed there for so long that she thought they had settled permanently, but then one morning a whole battalion plunged deep into her stomach, then to her hips, and then, at last, to her feet and her toes.
    Not having felt this sensation for eighty years, she did not recognize it as acute fatigue. But soon her thoughts began to lose their solidity, changing form as quickly as ghosts. She would look at a tree, for instance, consider its bark, and this would make her think of the color brown and people who were the color of trees, which in turn made her think of people as mahogany or cedar or pine or blue mahoe or even the poisonous manchineel. Then all at once she would become worried about what kind of tree she was and where she should be planted. She