In The Year of Their Lord, 1674: A Prelude

The rain coursed roughly along our street that summer, streams of it, bulging with rancor and arrogance, thick as a flight of rats, mighty like the wrath of God. The River rode high, threatened one night to lap at the bridges, even, and The Lake had the look of something so evil that they closed down the causeway. My parents did not celebrate my birthday. They were busy trying to keep the house from floating away—or so you’d think, they carried on so. It was my fourteenth, and a sensitive time, what with having to work so hard at being a man, and being made to feel by everyone on the planet that the sky would fall if I failed. In a pout, I stole out from home under cover of night despite round-the-clock flash flood watches, and in the back room of one of my friend’s houses he, I and several other young rebels scorched our insides with warm bourbon.

When I returned home with malicious intent to flaunt my drunkenness before my parents, I was startled to find instead my uncle Virgil Leon there, seated in a chair aimed right at the entryway.

He had come this time in muddied boots, worn jeans and a big, faded wool hunting jacket. A tall man and spare of frame, dark and shaved bald from toe to head, he fit the chair awkwardly, at once too gaunt to fill the seat and too long to bend his legs perpendicular to the floor. He looked very, very old, aged, I imagined, by his journeys. The Walker, his friends call him, because Virgil Leon disdains the psychic toil of teleportation and the vagaries of the enchanted highways. “Those are for the gods and for novices, and I ain’t neither,” he often says. So he walks, faster than most can run and rarely tiring, but walk he does, and no errand, however great, will hurry him along his way.

By this I knew he had come especially to see me, for my birthday.

My uncle’s eyes were hooded, and at first I wondered if he knew that I was there. But then he gestured me toward him—a silent curl of a long finger like a tree root. He beckoned me to sit at his feet as I was accustomed, and this is the story he told, in the words that he spoke:

“It’s like this: Your uncle has been a fool all this year, running around, dancing too much, acting up. Loving the wrong folks, like your Mama would say, and taking up with all the wrong people. I’m about spent. Used up my magic, wasted every bit of powder and herb and juice in my pantry, called on so many divinities so many times they won’t send the littlest sign my way for anything. The loas and orishas, the big gods of nature and the little gods of nations, the shades of my old teachers, the spirits of the rocks and trees and animals, every power that’s been my guides for centuries won’t let me past the door of conjury. Go rest up, Virgil! That’s what they say. You need to get right ‘fore you come back to us.”

“So, sad as it is to say, I don’t have no present for you this year. I’m fresh out. All I can do is tell you a story, so that’s what I’m gon do, and you listen good, boy, because this isn’t just any story. This is a story of your family history.

“Now hold my hand. Together we can work up enough stuff to go someplace where you can hear the story right. Breathe deep. Clear your head of whatever mess you’ve piled up in it. I need you to see what I see. The grains glint at your feet, between your toes. The ripples, black with crowns of white, movin slow and movin strong. You see what I’m seein? Near enough to taste it? We can...