Уолтер Мосли - Odyssey

He started walking over the uneven terrain, thinking that he would stop only if he came to a fence or maybe some natural barrier.

It was early morning but the summer heat was palpable; it felt like a pressure on his lungs and head. His breathing was labored in the heavy atmosphere. His feet hit the ground flat and hard. The impacts were uneven, as if he were staggering toward an end rather than headed somewhere.

“Sovereign.”

The clouds in the sky were everything from white to Brooks Brothers gray. Insects dive-bombed him, but Sovereign was unimpressed by their challenge. He was headed somewhere, probably wouldn’t make it. He was coming from a definite place but he was not certain of that origin.

“Sovereign.”

He wasn’t even sure if he had stopped before or after hearing his name the second time. He did think about the name, though. Sovereign. That was the address for a king.

“Sovereign.” It was Zenith.

“Hey,” the defendant said to his sister.

“What’s wrong, Sovereign?” Zenith asked as she walked up to him.

There was a man inside the man standing before the Midwestern housewife. The inside man, the old Sovereign, wanted to ridicule her stupidity. What’s wrong? I was blind and then I nearly killed a man. And now I’m going to stand trial for attempted murder. Do I have to be bleeding for you to see my problem?

“You can call me Sovy, Z,” the new Sovereign James said.

The woman’s intense eyes and dark ochre-colored skin seemed to be at odds with each other in some indefinable way. Then the gaze softened and she took him in her arms, pressing his head down on her shoulder with her right hand.

“Sovy,” she whispered into his ear.

“I was all alone, Z,” he said. These words brought his mind to the edge of the darkness that had been his blindness. He could see the impenetrable gloom but still failed at making the connection.

“What do you mean?” Zenith asked.

Moving back from the embrace the siblings held hands, forming an imperfect circle between them.

“I don’t know,” Sovereign said. “I mean, I... for years I was just going forward as if I was trying to get somewhere. Everything seemed to make sense. I cooked some pork chops, called women on the phone. I had an important job and a secret agenda. I wanted to have a child but don’t ask me why.”

When Zenith let go of her brother’s hands he felt as if he might fall, even though they hadn’t been leaning away from each other.

“Let’s get back,” she said.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Don’t come out here to stop me walking away and then just turn your back.”

“But, Sovy, I’m not a doctor.”

“You’re my sister.”

“We haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”

“But can’t you talk to me anyway?”

“What do you want me to say?” Zenith asked, the old edge in her words. “I don’t know you anymore.”

The old Sovereign was defeated by these words. The new man who stood in his stead felt liberated from a yen that had never been satisfied. The old, dissipating persona wanted to say, loudly, You never knew me . But the new man kept his mouth shut.

“Sovereign,” Zenith said.

“Let’s get back before the grits get cold,” newly self-named Sovereign the Second said.

He walked ahead of his sister at first but she caught up. When they were walking side by side he asked about her children.

After the breakfast was over Sovereign and his mother sat in his father’s old den. The shelving and blue carpet, walnut desk, and even the books were the same. There were no curved walls in Winifred James’s new house, but the innards were, in some limited instances, exact replicas of a life gone by.

After spending enough time, Sovereign realized that the color of the walls was similar but not the same as in his father’s den. Those walls were antique white but the new borders were brighter. Here and there were doodads and little photographs from Winifred’s current life in South Carolina. There was a photograph of one of the serving boys when he was six or seven, mugging for the camera.

These differences lent a stronger sense of reality to the home. It was as if life had continued in the home of his childhood. During his long absence the family had gone on.

Mother and son sat side by side on a sofa upholstered in animal skin. Solar James used to say this was the skin of a lion he’d killed in the Kenyan desert. The children all believed him until Drum-Eddie one day said that there were no hairy brown lions in the World Book Encyclopedia .

“It’s so good to see you, Eddie, um, I mean Sovy,” the slightly distracted older black woman said.

“Eagle wasn’t Papa’s real father,” Sovereign replied.

Winifred’s skin had begun graying as her hair had obviously done over the years. This lightening process made her seem less tangible, like a fading dream in the material illusion of the South Carolinian home.

She squinted and finally said, “No?”

“He was impotent. I guess she was fooling around.”

“Eagle told you about that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m raisin’ three hogs two miles out of town on my old friend Georgia’s farm. I go out there almost every morning to feed and visit them. When they hear me comin’ they get all excited and grunt and squeal.”

“You raise ’em for meat?” Sovereign asked while looking across the shelves.

Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Booker T. Washington, LeRoi Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, and a hundred other black literary lights filled out the library. Sovereign had rarely, if ever, asked his father about these books. But now, in the displaced San Diego library, he realized that his entire life had been governed by the content and impact of books that he’d never read.

“No, baby,” Winifred said. “I mean, I guess that was my intention at first, but after a while I just started to love ’em.”

“What?”

“The hogs. Clyde, Mr. North Hampton, and Earl. They rely on me even though I had at one time planned to kill ’em.”

“Are you all right, Mama?”

“Eddie says that he wants to take you down South America. I think you should go with him.”

“What about you?” Sovereign asked.

“It’s too hot down there for me,” she said, casting a casual gaze at the window. “And Spanish makes my head hurt. I mean, it’s a beautiful language but I don’t know it.”

“Portuguese.”

“What?”

“That’s what they speak in Brazil.”

“You’re young enough that you could learn, baby.”

“What do you think about Eagle and Dad?”

“ Father is just a word, baby. We all related when you come right down to it — the sharks and dogwoods, snails and men.”

“And sea anemone,” Sovereign the Second uttered.

“Say what?”

“It’s an animal that acts like a plant,” he said. “It anchors itself to a rock or crevice and then waits for food to come by.”

Winifred pried her gaze from whatever she’d seen outside. Her eyes were pale brown, maybe, Sovereign thought, a little occluded. But they saw him well enough.

“The only problem is the air,” she said after the long, noncompetitive test of wills.

“What about it?”

“It’s heavy with moisture. Solar can’t be here because the air is wrong. But I can still remember him. Sometimes I forget but then I’ll be standing in one a’ his old rooms and it hits me. I see him passin’ by a door or hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. That’s always a little second of happiness for me. That’s how I am — jumpin’ from one little spot of happiness to the other and raisin’ my hogs.”