Do Not Go Quietly, Page 3

  They reach the top of the bluff and there it finally lolls, gaudy on the other side of the parade grounds. Nobody else is around. The palace lights throw strange shadows on the unbroken snow, the lumps and humps where statues and benches and pigeons should be. Mara has never been this close to the palace at night before. She squints her eyes against the glare.

  “Just a little farther,” Jenny says. She sounds almost sorrowful. “I wish I could’ve lived to see you do it, Mar, but I know you’ll—”

  The last of the three matches dies with a fizzing whistle. Jenny winks out. Mara blinks and she’s lying beneath a bench on the parade grounds, alone, a basket with four matches left at her head and a burned-out bundle of smoking char clutched in her fist.

  I don’t want to go any farther. No. No more moving. Here in the lee of the bench, out of the wind, she feels safe and comfortable, almost warm. After all that walking—vision or not, it had been a lot of walking—all she wants to do is let the snow fall over her like a blanket until Grandmother comes to pull it back. What was it that Jenny had wanted her to do? Why had she dragged her all the way up here? If she was only a vision, did it really matter what she had wanted?

  Up ahead, the lights of the palace blur into a soothing smear.

  Rest, my child, whispers the voice of the priest. You’ve earned a rest, after all you’ve been through.

  Sleep, poor innocent soul, wheedles the voice of the author, the writer of fairy stories and moral parables. You’ve suffered so well, so beautifully well, and wouldn’t you like to go to Heaven?

  Take a load off, says the voice of her father, slurred from too much drink. Get comfortable. Ain’t comfort a grand and glorious thing?

  Look at the lights of my palace, says the voice of the princess, flutelike and well-fed and used to being obeyed. Don’t they look nice? So pretty! Wouldn’t you just love to sit here and look at them forever?

  And really, truth be told, she would like nothing more than to stay right where she’s at and do just that. But the song of the fire is still in her head—all those voices raised until the rafters over the heads of the rich and the spiteful caught and smoldered and burned like kindling—and nobody who advised you to lie down and sleep instead of fighting was ever worth trusting.

  She takes three more matches in her hand, frozen to a claw. She strikes them weakly against the frosted granite of the bench.

  It’s Grandmother who lifts her to her feet this time, Grandmother and a whole crowd of friends and colleagues—rabble-rousers and revolutionaries, torch-bearers and mask-wearers, so many Mara can’t count them all. There’s a current running through them that feels like fire. Someone sets her atop Grandmother’s shoulders and a cheer goes up, an echoing hurrah that sends snow sliding off statues. Mara holds her breath, waiting for soldiers to come pouring over the hillside from every direction—for gunshots and alarmed shouts, the crunch of clubs on bone and the confused cacophony of a street battle—but somehow, miraculously, nothing happens.

  “C’mon, child,” Grandmother says. “Hang onto my hat. We’re going to tear it all down, the entire blessed thing.”

  They surge across the parade grounds like an army of shadows, cheering, invincible, flickering firebrands beating back the steady electric glare of the palace all the way to the front gates. They break against the bars once—twice—again—until with a sound like a groan, the hinges give beneath the weight of hurled bodies and the entire structure goes toppling backwards into the snow. Now there are soldiers pouring forth, drunk on holiday milk punch or too much sleep, clumsy with sudden surprise. Most of them don’t even have time to fix their bayonets or load their weapons. They swing their rifles like clubs, as the wave sweeps over them, pushing them back across the courtyard to the palace itself.

  Grandmother sets Mara on the ground. All around them, the fight is joining.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she says. “I got ninety-nine lives, and this isn’t my first or my last. You get in there and give ’em what for.” She pushes Mara towards a side entrance. “Go!”

  And Mara goes, darting through the thicket of legs, the distracted throng of brawlers giving and getting just over her head. She’s inside the palace before anybody has time to even think about stopping her.

  Inside is more chaos. Guards are already rushing to secure the exits. Maids and servants and cooks and governesses mill and shriek in confusion. Someone outside hurls a flaming brand through one of the ornate windows, setting the curtains alight. Mara cuts a path through them all, shoving and clawing, headed for the grand central staircase. In the way of dreams and visions, she knows who waits for her on the topmost floor, on a balcony in a room at the end of an impossible hallway. The palace is vast beyond reckoning, but she doesn’t lose her way, not even for a second.

  Behind her, the front doors creak and rattle and finally give as the human wave batters them down.

  Down that long, red hallway on the uppermost floor—through a bedroom stuffed with toys and fancies—past a table laden with sweets and a wardrobe stuffed with beautiful unworn dresses—and now she’s bursting back out a final door into the cold night air, pushing through delicate lace draperies onto a wrought-iron balcony caked with snow. There, just ahead, stands the Princess Annalise, youngest of her doomed family, blonde ringlets already going limp from exposure to the wind and the wet.

  She looks down her upturned nose at this ragged invader—the newspapers wrapped around her feet, the soot on her cheeks, her dress in stained tatters. Below them, the battle rages on; there’s more fire now, gunshots, screaming of all kinds in all octaves. Smoke billows out the windows, filling the room behind them in a roiling gray cloud. The princess is obviously frightened—and who wouldn’t be, considering her situation—but she hangs onto her composure with a determination that would at least be admirable in someone who understood pain.

  She locks eyes with Mara, disdainful, taking a step back so that her back is braced against the balcony’s railing.

  “Who are you?” she asks. “What do you want with my family?”

  The question is so coldly oblivious, it makes Mara’s fists clench. She sucks in a deep breath beneath her hollow cheeks, her ribs like ladder rungs and her empty, aching void of a stomach.

  “Everything,” she says. “To stop being cold. To stop being hungry.”

  She takes another step forward. Annalise presses farther away, her own delicate hands balling into fists. They circle one another like wary cats.

  Hsssst.

  The second-to-last match goes out. Everything—balcony, battle, princess—suddenly vanishes like smoke up a chimney. Mara is alone in a snowbank just outside the palace gates, three dead matches in her fist and one left in the basket at her feet.

  She’s soaked through and wet to the bone. Ice has formed on her eyelids, weighing them down. She tries to stand, willing herself upright, but for some reason, her legs refuse to obey. Through clawing at the iron bars, she manages to pull herself to a standing position, although it costs her most of the skin on her naked fingers. She stands there, clinging to the cold metal like it’s Grandmother’s trouser leg, for a hundred years of winter before the blood sluggishly remembers how to run through her veins and her legs go back to bearing weight, if clumsily. She wobbles and wavers like an old man leaving a saloon at closing time.

  The snow is flying fast and thick. Above her, crouched like some bulbous, phosphorescent toad, the palace squats triumphant, hale and whole and untouched, its gilded inhabitants warm in their beds. There will never be a day in their long lives, or the lives of their descendants, where they have to worry about a thing. They sleep on stolen land beneath stolen feathers. They eat and take, and they have no need for matches or match girls.

  See me, she says to the palace, squinting up through the snowstorm into its blind windowpane eyes. Look at me, you big ugly thing.

  Somewhere, a church bell tolls 3:00 a.m. The palace pays the tiny figure no mind.

  See us. See us or we’ll th
row down your gates and trample your gardens and take back everything you’ve stolen, if it takes a hundred attempts and a hundred lifetimes.

  If the palace were a sow, it might roll over and crush her beneath its pale bulk. Being only a building, it doesn’t move. As it has for a century, it just sits there lumpen on its foundations, an eyesore stooping to conquer.

  Mara is so tired of fighting. She leans her full weight against the fence, too exhausted even to cry.

  One match left, says Grandmother’s voice from somewhere inside the fog behind her eyes. Might want to light it and see what happens.

  What Mara wants, more than anything, is a warm blanket and hot stew and all the things those girls inside the palace take as their birthrights. What she wants is to be left alone. But she sighs, feeling suddenly as though she’s done this a thousand times before, and she reaches into the basket dangling from the crook of her arm—has it been there this entire time?—and she pulls the final match from its snug, wicker nest. It seems to weigh as much as a telegraph pole.

  Hssht.

  Nothing happens. No visions drop like painted backgrounds. No figures rise to lift her from the snow. The palace doesn’t crumple in on itself; the vengeful ghosts of all the royal family have wronged stay in their graves. Mara feels no surge of warmth or revolutionary fervor swelling in the marrow of her bones. There is just this moment, suspended between midnight and dawn, and the flame at the end of a matchstick. What she does with it is entirely up to her.

  Something rattles against her dragging foot. A half-finished bottle of liquor left behind by some lonesome New Year reveler. She bends to pick it up, takes a hesitant sniff. It stinks like a saloon, like her barely-remembered father. Whatever’s inside, it’s strong, and clear, and were she to put the match to it—were she to tear off what was left of the hem of her ragged skirt and stuff it into the mouth of the bottle, were she to carefully heft the entire makeshift projectile in her hand as the flames slowly crept down the fabric to meet the noxious stuff in the bottom—it would make such a lovely blue comet as she hurled it over the fence with the last of her strength, such a fine and furious meteor, striking home through the closest window she could find.

  She watches the drapes catch, listens to the panicked cries within and without, the distant sirens already blaring. She smiles, drops her basket, and topples over sideways in the snow.

  They find her frozen outside the palace gates the next morning, spent matches spread around her in a blackened circle. They shake their heads, disgusted at the wanton violence of the underclass. Look, they say. This was Mara, the rotten granddaughter of a rottener revolutionary. Even their children are corrupted and liable to lash out for no good reason at all. What will it come to, in the end, with such a nest of vipers stirring dissent?

  Look, say the matchstick girls, the wives in the breadlines, the hungry and cold and exploited. Look. Her name was Mara, and she was the granddaughter of a revolutionary, the daughter of warrior queens. If she could do it, why not us? If a dying girl could light a match, how hard must it be?

  Their whispers, running through the crowds, sound like the faintest crackle of flames.

  It’s the last evening of the year, as bitterly cold as bones in an ash-heap, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great capital city, all the way to the rusted remains of the palace gates.

  What the Mountain Wants

  by Maurice Broaddus and Nayad Monroe

  It was a normal November until the mountain rose up, towering over our neighborhood, changing everything. There were no birth pains to warn of its arrival, no earthquakes. It simply appeared, silently rising from the Crown Hill Cemetery and draping its shadows over us. It left a great hole in our neighborhood, an uncharted space on the map, drawing the city of the dead up into its tumorous mass.

  People feared the mountain. “For Sale” signs sprouted like weeds in yards throughout the neighborhood. Those who didn’t want to leave hoarded food, water, and weapons, suddenly withdrawn from and suspicious of their neighbors. A few wanted to appease the mountain, to offer up a sacrifice, but they perished like those men who violated the laws of approaching the Ark of the Covenant.

  The mountain speaks to me. It wants me; it has its own gravity. That pull demands my perception, my presence, my participation. Despite my misgivings, I heed its call. Who has the strength to deny a mountain?

  The parking lot of B & E Liquor faces the new vista of the mountain of Crown Hill Cemetery, lit only by the sodium glare of the single bulb, grudgingly replaced by the city, in a lone lamp post. Sickly orange illumines two figures in the lot, cold lampin’ with the mountain.

  “This nigga right here think he somethin’ cause he got him a mountain.” Zeb watches the solitary man scramble along the peak’s side. Born Zebulon C. Minor II, he figures he got off easy when it came to names, considering his brothers Abimelech, Japheth, and Melchizedek. Zebulon means “to dwell.” Sometimes a name defines a person.

  “What’chu gone do with a mountain?” Montaque Harding’s rheumy eyes also gaze upward. No one calls him anything other than Q. He neither questions his name’s origins nor hates it. Sometimes a name is all someone has.

  “Exactly my point, Q. Shit pops up, disrupts everything, then he walk around like he better than everyone else cause he up there and we down here. Ain’t nobody’s mountain. Nobody run that shit.”

  “Zeb, he living a lie.”

  “Hell, yeah. It’s all lies now. A lie can become the truth, if you tell it enough times.”

  “Perception is everything.”

  “That’s deep. Or bullshit. I’m too high to tell.” The glow of Zeb’s next hit lights his face. He speaks through held breath. “When did we become old heads, drinking on the corner?”

  “We ain’t there yet. Just two brothas chillin’ after a hard day of hustling.”

  “Yeah, it’s not like we’ve gone crazy, running up and down a mountain. Yet.”

  Q pulls his weary gaze from the mountain. “What you be talkin’?”

  “Talking that shit. I thought you knew.”

  They carve out the corner as sacred space.

  Zeb pours out some of his 40 for the mountain.

  I never had the companionship of a pet. I caught a turtle once. I let it creep around in my mother’s garden. The turtle reached the chain-link fence which bordered the yard. It stuck its head through a hole, backed up when that didn’t work, and then used its claws to begin to climb the fence. Its heavy, cumbersome shell wobbled back and forth with each claw-pull upward. I called over my cousins, and we watched it struggle to ascend. I left to join a game of hide and seek, not worried about the turtle’s chance of success. When I returned an hour later, it was gone, and I never saw it again. I learned from that mistake.

  Before its transformation, Crown Hill Cemetery was already the highest natural point in the city of Indianapolis. Colonel Eli Lilly himself was buried at its peak. It was also the final resting place of John Dillinger and his rumored prodigious member. Almost final. But maybe the mountain has always waited there, curled like a monstrous fetus below the ground, and gestating until the time of its arrival.

  I could not stay away, nor could I leave. I carefully creep between the graves, clearing away the uprooted bushes and exposed roots. Arranging the headstones and building a parsonage of bones. Harvesting ivory relics, the pieces scattered, as if the mountain has chewed up the bodies and vomited them over itself. Like the turtle, I move upward at a slow and steady pace, compelled to strive for its peak.

  Unlike the turtle, I know that I will fall.

  The wall around Crown Hill Cemetery—wrought iron bars on a brick foundation—remains intact, except for the hole left where a drunk driver ran a stop sign and drove across Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Street, miraculously missing all traffic but plowing into the wall. In the darkness, two figures sneak through the gap, cold lampin’ with the mountain.

  “You got to hurry your ass u
p,” Q says with the impatience of an older cat. Tall and gaunt, though walking with a slight stoop, he nimbly slides through and waits in the shadows. “You like a potato on legs.”

  “We on a deadline all of a sudden?” Short and bulbous, Zeb favors his left leg, sheathed in a homemade, plastic cast held on by elastic cords. One day, when he took out the trash, two boys jumped him and demanded his wallet. In the struggle, they stabbed him in the calf and left him with nerve damage, unable to fully use his ankle. “It’s not like I have to get my head up by a certain time.”

  “Man, I know you already high. You on that smoke like it your nine to five.”

  “It only looks like I don’t work, but I work. I got custody of Trey.” Because of his special needs, tending to his oldest son is a full-time job. Zeb can’t stand long enough to work a steady job, but Social Security denied his claim. Unable to afford official pain medications either, he smokes to get through his odd jobs. His ankle throbs already, just looking at the mountain that looms tall above him. “I have to stay steady grinding. Bills come too fast and checks come too slow.”

  “I heard that. My daughter’s six, going to be seven next month. I’m all about her. If she has to get on a bus, get on my bike, or get on my back, I’m getting her to school each day. She’s the future. She’s my everything.”