Farewell, Amethystine

27

Later that night, on the way back to LA, I stopped at a twenty-four-hour filling station to make a long-distance call.

“Shep,” a man answered on the ninth ring.

“Tell her it’s a starry night,” I said, and then I hung up.

There I was, a Black man in 1970, driving through the countryside with a corpse in the trunk. I had a trick or two up my sleeve and a loaded .38 in my pocket.

One of the good things about having lived half a century under the weight of second- and third-class citizenship — bad luck was never a surprise.

If they wanted me they would get me. That was all there was to it.

It was just shy of 3:00 a.m. by the time I got to the edge of one of the last wooded areas in Compton. When I drove up, she emerged from the bamboo thicket.

Tall, Black, wearing a long dress that would have been in style somewhere in the world in any of the last five centuries, Mama Jo gestured for me to drive into a cleared-out spot in the cane. After I drove in she pulled a bamboo scrim to hide the dark car.

Jo was twenty years my senior, but she was still vital and strong. She kissed me on the lips and I opened the trunk.

“Any metal on him?” were her first words to me.

“Naw,” I said, shaking my head. “Fearless and I both checked him.”

“Okay then, I got a wheelbarrow right ovah here.”

We dumped the corpse, blankets and all, into the pushcart and wheeled Brad Mirth to a place behind a rude cabin.

The backyard of Jo’s medieval cottage was carpeted with thick grasses and surrounded by heavy oaks. It was lit by a high-powered soda-vapor lamp that topped a ten-foot concrete pole. There were two deep-set wooden chairs and a table that was also a trunk. I never knew what she kept in that trunk, but there was an eight-foot-high double-walled oak barrel that was nestled in a three-foot depression under the oldest tree. It was a barrel I knew quite well.

“You look kinda peaked, Easy,” Jo said when we were both seated.

Not knowing what to say, I hunched my shoulders and swung my head a few inches to the left. I had no idea what these gestures might mean, but I was pretty sure that my host did.

“There’s a jug down on your left,” she said. “Take two good chugs.”

I reached for the heavy ceramic jar, lifted it to my lips, and took the first draft.

“We didn’t even talk, Jo,” I said. “How’d you know I’d need just this blend?”

“You a sensitive soul, baby,” she said in an up tempo. “If you was gonna ask for a starry Night, I knew you’d need a swig of Tranquility. But now I see your eye, I figure you need at least two.”

I took the second dose. The flavor was like a whole lemon that had been blended in an Osterizer, seasoned with strong vinegar and fresh loam.

The effect was immediate, though I find it a little hard to explain. I was aware of my breath and also the space that my body occupied. The strong light of the soda lamp felt as if it had weight, and this pressure seemed to buoy rather than oppress me.

Mama Jo was a witch in the oldest understanding of that term. She had knowledge of a great history of natural medicines, drugs, and ways to enhance and even elongate life. She also knew poisons. She had mastered elixirs, vapors, powders, and even stones that, when they came in contact with the skin, could cause anything from temporary suffering to permanent psychosis to death.

She was the Black woman who lived on the outskirts of town that no one messed with. There’s one in every southern hamlet and village. A woman who had apprentices who would avenge her death should any harm come to her.

When I was a teenager and she was nearly forty, Jo took me as her lover for a night, or maybe it was two. While making love she whispered to me, telling me things that I will never forget. She pampered and pounded me, fell in love with me in a way that she’d never abandon.

“What’s up with you, Easy?”

Fearless had asked me that question and I’d answered him after a fashion, but Jo’s inquiry, along with those swigs of Tranquility, had a whole other effect.

“I’on’t know, Jo. I mean, I met a woman who is all the way serious, know what I mean? Smart, pretty, Black, and not worried one whit about what somebody think.”

“Sounds like a woman made for you. A woman drawn to the kinda world you live in.”

“She asked me to find her ex-husband and I did... but he was dead. Murdered.”

“That sound even more like you.”

“Uh-huh. It does. And you know, usually I know how to keep my distance. Like a, like a, like a junkie know where the junk’s at and still stay away.”

I took a third swig of Tranquility.

“You know, baby,” Jo said with the gentlest smile on her generous lips. “A man can run his entire life, but that don’t mean he gonna get away. You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

I did. I did, and I also knew that there was no more to say about Amethystine Stoller right then.

“His name was Bradley Mirth,” I said, tilting my head toward the wheelbarrow. “He was gettin’ ready to kill me and two friends.”

“You the one kill him?”

“Yes. Up in the pinewood forest near Big Bear.”

“Why not leave him for the forest to eat?”

“He tied in tight with LA cops.”

Jo had huge nostrils. When she took in a deep breath it was like an event.

“Okay,” she said, standing up from the heavy chair.

I pushed the barrow to the barrel and peeked over the side. The vat was three-quarters filled with an oily liquid that seemed to contain a night sky full of stars. There was depth to the lustrous liquor that suggested an even greater depth than the huge barrel encompassed.

“Come on, Easy, let’s get him up. Remember, we got to let him down slow, ’cause even one drop on yo skin will make a mark for life.”

This was only the third corpse I’d brought to Jo’s funerary barrel, but I was very aware of its bite.

We raised Mirth’s blanketed head up to the edge of the barrel and then slowly lifted until his body was leaning over the side. Even though his head was now enveloped in the bitter brew, it took us another ten minutes or so until releasing his feet.

We took a good six steps back, in order to avoid the noxious fumes. Then Jo said, “Why don’t you say the words this time, baby?”

This was a surprise because Jo was usually the one in charge of her domain. She loved men; loved them. But her sense of rightness in the world was most definitely matriarchal. And so her request that I deliver the eulogy over the man I’d killed was, in its own way, a blessing.

“Bradley Mirth was a serious man, a man who was deeply committed to a way of life that did not forgive error. He was no coward and in his own way, probably, pious. I don’t believe he would hold his death against the ones that killed him, and I regret that his people will never know what happened. But that was the life he lived, and I am sure that his soul will be at peace with this final tribute.”

“Amen,” said Mama Jo.

“Amen.”