The Fifth Sacred Thing Read Online Free Page A

interested in drums than people,” Madrone said.
    “But what a percussionist!” Maya said. “He could drum the rain down from the sky! I had such talented grandsons, once. Bird was a genius with any instrument he touched. That’s not boasting, that’s just stating a fact.”
    “I loved his voice,” Madrone said. “I loved to hear him sing.” I loved him, she thought. I loved him from the very first day I spent in San Francisco, still in shock from what happened in Guadalupe, and grieving for my mother, and scared of those strangers who called themselves Grandma Johanna, Grandpa Rio, Auntie Maya. Bird gave me his favorite stone, a flat black beach rock with the white pattern of a fossilized sand dollar on its back.
    “And so handsome,” Maya went on. “The boys both had my eyes, set in that clear milk-chocolate skin. Do you remember chocolate?”
    “We used to have it sometimes in Guadalupe,” Madrone said.
    “Don’t outlive your descendants,” Maya told her. “It’s no fun. I’m only sticking it out until Bird comes back.”
    “You may have to live forever, then,
madrina.”
    “No.” Maya shook her head. “He’s not dead. If he were dead, I’d feel it. Anyway, we’re here for Sandy now. Say a prayer for him, and place his stone.”
    Faded marigolds and wilting chrysanthemums dotted the mound. There were no cemeteries in the city, no land that could be spared for burial, so people brought their grave offerings here. Sandy’s stone would lie in company with others, sharing their offerings in death as people shared food in life. He, at least, would not be lonely.
    “What is remembered lives,” Madrone said, stooping and placing the stone on the north side of the mound.
“Jiyi shi yongyuan bu mie de.”
She stumbled over the inflections Lou had painstakingly taught her. Sandy had come from the north side of the city, where they spoke Mandarin instead of Spanish as their second language.
    “He was a good man,” Maya said. “So sweet to everyone, and sensitive. His passing leaves a big emptiness.” Yes, she would miss him, like she missed so many others, but the ache in the back of her throat was for Madrone. She was too young to bear so many losses.
    Madrone nodded without speaking. Maya could feel the earth under her, alive like a beating heart. Or perhaps, she thought, I’m feeling my own throbbing feet? Still, it was good, at the place of the dead, to acknowledge that One to whom she had pledged herself long ago, the aliveness at the heart of things, the ever-turning wheel of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. It had occurredto Maya lately that calling
that
the Goddess, even though she’d fought for the term all her life, was—what? Not so much a metaphor, more in the nature of an inside joke.
    Madrone turned away abruptly. She felt a great need, suddenly, to be alone.
    “I’m going to make an offering to Yemaya,” she said. The Yoruba Sea Goddess was her favorite of the orishas, the old Goddesses and Gods that had come on the slave ships from Africa.
    “Give me a jar of honey,” Maya said. “I’ll go annoy my ancestors.”
    “I thought ‘commune with’ was the operative term,” Madrone said, pulling out a small jar of honey from the depths of the basket.
    “Jewish ancestors don’t commune. They kvetch. That means complain.”
    “That’s one Yiddish word I know,
madrina.”

    Maya walked over to where a small crowd was gathered around the Jewish shrine, a brightly tiled and weatherproof ark under an arching pomegranate tree. A carved stone lectern provided a platform for the Torah scroll, and a young woman was chanting in Hebrew. The sounds took Maya back to her childhood, the voice of her grandfather praying in the morning, the voices of her mother and father, arguing.
    “Lay off me, Betty!” she could hear her father say. “I’m not going to synagogue, I told you! I don’t believe in his damn God!”
    “You don’t go for God, you go for him. He’s an old man,