Creatures of Passage

Ferryman

The goddess Nephthys ferried lost souls through the dark currents of the Great Mystery, from one isle of existence to another and out to the far reaches of fate, all the while filled with a profound sadness for her brother, the murdered god Osiris, whose power was taken by dividing him into pieces...

Nephthys Kinwell was not a savior of souls. That was God's charge. Or maybe the trade of the Devil. But she did ferry souls from one quadrant to another, and over the streets that now covered the prehistoric marshes of the capital of the territories. There was a certain geography to it all, she'd learned. To the win lose draw of lives. For Nephthys Kinwell knew-as all wandering hearts do-that it was not enough to know where things happened in the lines and circles of human lives, but why, since the reasons for happenings were buried much deeper than the happenings themselves. So she never had to look for the signs omens bones of creatures of passage. They found her.

The kingdoms of the land that together made the united territories had just turned two hundred years old the summer before, a fledgling in the long line of empires risen and fallen. But in 1977 Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire. It was the capital's wild child east of a river that bore its name, a place where much was yet discovered. Anything was possible in that easternmost quadrant, where all things lived and died on the edges of time and space and meaning. It was a realm of contradictions, an undulating landscape of pristine land and dirty water, of breathtaking hills and decimated valleys. Crab apple and cherry trees flourished in the yards of abandoned houses and centuries-old oaks flanked run-down corner stores. Pushers stood watch for cars when little kids were crossing the street and junkies held doors open for old women. Paroled men played basketball and chess with fatherless boys. The unemployed sat in windows and kept tabs on the injustices of the land. I'll tell your mama was the universal threat, because next to God there was none more powerful. And the damnation and glory of man was forever intertwined in Anacostia, since all who lived there were faced with the unconquerable presence of both.

So the mechanics of rule and office and Congress and the four-year-old District of Columbia Council was all a vast gray mass glimpsed across the water. Fairfax, Arlington, Montgomery, and Prince George's fiefdoms were distant domains. The triumvirate of the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument stood alabaster and resolute, and like the Acropolis held great dominion. But their reach was hardly felt in that east-of-the-river realm, where people lived a reality that was and was not of their own making. Where dreams came true even when people didn't want them to.

Now Nephthys Kinwell sat on the throne of a worn-out chair in a crumbling Anacostia apartment on the anniversary of her twin brother's death. Or rather, the day he was found in the river. Each passing year marked the loss of her binary existence, and this observance only heightened the unbearable inertia of one. She didn't have the strength to get behind the wheel of the Plymouth at a time like this; she had no will to help her passengers journey through the pitch black of the happenings of life, for sometimes she was the one adrift. And none of the people who got into her car could help her cope with the past. Nor could the white girl in the trunk charm what lay ahead.

Nephthys shifted in the chair. She could still remember the inexplicable feelings she had that day, even before a body was found and she was called down to the morgue. Her head felt like it was exploding. She doubled over from some agony in her abdomen, as if being cut from the inside out. She was tormented by a searing pain in her lower leg that arrested her breath. And the more air she tried to take into her lungs, the more she felt as if she were drowning. That must have been when it happened. When she lost the other half of her soul. What that meant crept deep into her in June of every year, so that she had to boil it down to something tolerable with as much liquor as she could stand. Because if she didn't drink, she had to think about the body. She had to think about the shark.

But no matter how much she drank, she could never completely wash away the sight at the morgue. The eyes bulged grotesquely out of their sockets. Clumps of hair scraped away along with the scalp, where bright-red splotches remained. The lower left leg was missing, torn away as if chewed off by some beast. Nephthys had stared at all that for a long time with disbelieving eyes. No, those couldn't be the dungarees with the patch she'd affixed on the pocket just the week before. That was not his boot. No, that was not her brother's half finger, the one shortened like her own, for they had been born holding hands. In the flickering morgue lights, she looked from one horror on the body to another and found that the world was big enough that it had to be someone else. Not her brother.

Nephthys settled deeper in her chair and reached for the small flask that lived always in the pocket of her housecoat and brought it to her lips and drank what was left. The passage of years did not make the image of her brother's bloated figure among the putrid waters of the Anacostia River any easier to bear. Worse were the seemingly pleasant, undisturbed faces of the police officers when she'd arrived at the station to file that useless report. Her brother's death was labeled "unsolved," as if his life had been a riddle, his very existence quickly called into doubt. That was why she'd spread his ashes that way, in different places. It allowed her to think of him living in other bodies of water instead, moving through other currents that gave him passage to better places: the cherry blossom-flecked currents of the Tidal Basin; the shallow majesty of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool; the slushy inflow of the McMillan Reservoir; the black tranquility of the Georgetown canal; the roiling deep of the Potomac River.

She looked around the cluttered room. It was dim and she could just make out the frames of objects at her feet. There was the tidal wash of things she'd brought in and dropped on the floor over the years, which covered the old rugs and kept the cracked tiles from view. She lost track of time and her mind drifted like ether in the gloom. Was it dawn or dusk? Or some other dimension birthed from memory and pain? She couldn't be sure. The alcohol she'd been drinking moved slowly through the slack passageways of her veins, a seething current of heat searing her nerves. In that state she could sail an ocean of her own making, tepid and stagnant. She could block out nearly everything, except the image of her brother's broken body and the fog that carried the call of other wandering hearts. Through the haze of the early-morning hours (late-evening?) she felt her half finger throbbing as it always did in dampness, the tip now dark and bereft of the topaz light it had when she was a child. The half finger didn't glow anymore. Not as it did in the casket-black nights back on the Sea Islands, where she and her brother once played in the wonderland of the Gullah marshes, when they glared at a dark world through the fearless, hopeful eyes of children. The fact that she and her brother had somehow managed to move from one island to another kind of island was not lost on her, and she placed this on the long list of things she found darkly ironic.

One of her legs was going numb and she tried to reposition herself against the shabby seat cushion. She rubbed the mangled flesh of her half finger. They were born holding hands, she and her brother, their fingers conjoined at the pointer. And they would have lived their entire lives that way, if they hadn't been cut apart soon after they took their first breath. It's all gone now, she thought. The Sea Islands were far, far away, a past that lay underwater. Every bit of that long-ago life was now lodged in the tubing of ancient coral reefs, disintegrating beneath the verdigris of lives once lived, folded into the happenings of other happenings. Many years later, gated communities and resorts and time-share flats would be built on top of the old black-family cemeteries and bank-seized properties of the Gullah lands. And the few living who remained would be the unwitting stars of a sort of human nature preserve, where tourists came to smile and point as if looking at the last of a species. But Nephthys had no way of knowing this as she sat in her apartment in the southeast quadrant. What she knew was that now there was only the Washington Navy Yard and Bolling Air Force Base. Now there were overgrown lots and houses that were no longer homes. Now people walked the streets as shadows of themselves, joining the ghost tribes of the Nacotchtank Indians, creatures of passage from one generation to the next. Her half finger throbbed harder still, and once more she was reminded of how life could begin and how it could end.

Indigo swirlin' round de vat...

Nephthys shook her head vigorously to silence the sound of the past, that old Sea Island song she and her brother sang as they helped their mother stir the indigo in the vat. She caught a glimpse of herself in the faded oval mirror that hung from the desiccated wall like a witch's talisman and turned away. She did not want to see the creases that time had ground into her walnut-colored face, her graying hair now blending with the dust. More and more, she was uncomfortable looking at her reflection...