The Healing

Chapter 33





Over the next few months, Granada had plenty of occasions to remember that mysterious smile and wonder what Polly had set in motion. The season was filled with unsettling dreams, and not just Granada’s. Signs prophesying endings and beginnings appeared across the plantation.

While the cotton bloomed pink and yellow in May, the men came to Polly disturbed by fevered visions and stirring passions, whispering about Freedom. Even the biggest of them shook when they uttered the word. The women began to notice their days of blood coinciding with one another, and there was a great increase in fertility. Barren women, and those thought too old, found themselves with child.

In August the fields turned snowy white with cotton, signifying a good crop for the master, who would get on his horse and disappear for days at a time. Everyone whispered that with the absence of his wife, he could most always be found in the fine cabin he had furnished for himself and Rubina.

In September the first of the crop—picked, ginned, baled, hauled to Port Gayoso on wagons, and loaded on barges—made its way down the river to New Orleans, where Granada knew the mistress was kept, being prayed over by nuns and treated by European doctors.

Each Sunday morning, Granada watched Silas, dressed in his preaching suit and toting a black leather Bible, climb up on his mule and head out to one of the master’s settlements to honor God and curse Polly.

As for Polly, each month during that succession of nights she called the dead moon, the old woman had visions of the snake. She said it had grown in her dreams into a monstrous double-headed creature without a tail, but with gaping jaws at either end, devouring slave and master alike.

“It’s going bite us either way,” Polly would call out mournfully in her sleep, “coming and going, going and coming,” until she woke herself. Then she would rise in the dark and go out to the snaky places, where she sat under a moonless sky, listening to what the no-legged beasts had to say.

Though Granada’s seeing was still tentative, like the uncertain light cast by a flickering candle, Polly promised that with time it would blaze up like hickory logs burning on the hearth and show Granada things that she could never imagine.

Throughout this season of signs, Granada learned to watch and to listen. She waited for the sight to burn bright, to light the way for her, to reveal her place in that river of souls.