Free Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley Page A

woods.
    Even before she answered I knew that something was wrong, but when I saw her my concern made me forget my mission—at least for a while.
    As a rule Mama Jo stood six foot three, two inches and a bit taller than I. Her stature had always been erect and unbending. Her skin was kissed by night, and her eyes were dark enough to see evil that poor mortals like me couldn’t even imagine. She was nineteen years older than I, but, as a rule, no one would know that by looking at us.
    That day Jo sagged and looked every one of her sixty-seven years. Sadness leaked from those barrier eyes; weakness too. She reached out for my shoulder and touched me lightly, showing none of the physical strength I knew she possessed.
    “Easy?” she said. “Baby.”
    She fell forward into my arms, and I held her tightly as she cried and moaned a deep and painful lament that was beyond my ken.
    “It was the earth that brought you here,” she whispered.
    The earth was her Goddess; not a sentient being but rather a concoction of forces that moved in mathematical precision, organizing spiders and grains of sand, human beings and clouds.
    Her tears were hot on my neck, and I was reminded of the intimacy we shared twenty-nine years before in the swamplands between Texas and Louisiana.
    “Baby,” she said over and over.
    “Maybe we should go inside,” I suggested.
    The sigh coming from her was deeper than Charcoal Joe’s grumbling. She lifted up from my shoulder and I put an arm around her waist to help her into the medieval abode.
    It wasn’t until we were inside that I noticed that all she wore was a man’s long-sleeved and navy blue dress shirt. It fit her as well as any modest dress; this was because it belonged to her son Domaque Jr. He was a monster of a man, deformed and different, with a soul as deep as his mother’s and an innocence that had little use for his nearly impossible strength.
    Jo was wearing that shirt because she needed love, and the love for her son was the gravity granted her by the earth spirit she revered.
    The dwelling hadn’t changed much. The floor was packed ocher earth. The ancient bench and alchemist’s table still dominated. Small armadillos wrestled in their corner under the watchful eye of a cat that looked very much like a miniature lynx. A full-grown raven croaked at me from his shoulder-high stand and the bedding was still made from straw bound by thick hemp and coarse material. My regular chair, cobbled together from rough tree branches and animal hide, was there and the fireplace, which never emitted smoke above the forest keep, was crackling low.
    The only real difference was the mantle above the hearth. The last time I was there it had been lined with thirteen candles all lit and winking. But now the previous inhabitants had returned: twelve armadillo skulls, six on each side of a man’s head that had been cured in a barrel of salt for seven years after his death. Domaque Sr. yowled there. Jo had removed the macabre setting when Helen Ray, called Coco by her friends, moved in. Young, white, collegiate Coco was disturbed by the ex-lover’s skull watching her and Jo writhing in passion on the straw mattress.
    I moved to sit in my usual chair but Jo took me by the arm and said, “Come sit next to me on the bench, baby.”
    We held each other for long minutes. She’d stopped crying but the depths of her pain thrummed in our embrace. Her sorrow leached into me. I could read it on the mantelpiece and her nakedness under that beloved shirt. I knew it when she wasn’t at the door waiting for me as she always had been, and in the emptiness of the cottage that would have been in style at any time in the last thousand years—somewhere.
    —
    “Go sit in your chair, baby,” she said after our long embrace.
    I did as she bade and our eyes met in the pleasant gloom of her otherworldly hideaway.
    “How long she been gone?” I asked.
    “Three days.”
    “What happened?”
    “I, I wanted a baby. I