The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield

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this kind of thing is hard to say. Saying it is not really like the thing you want to say. It’s like a tree’s shadow is like a tree and also is the thing most not like a tree. Everything I’m saying is shadows. But what’s inside—Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

      Layla’s Gift from God

      Not to go on about a thing, but sometimes at night when I was rubbing my hand over my belly I thought of Layla and Ambrosia alone on the other side of Jimmy’s house, and I imagined crazy things. Like Ambrosia as a sponge inside Layla soaking up too much of one part of Layla so that she was robbed of that part and Ambrosia was so stuffed full of it she had no room for anything else. Say she took all the fear. Or the rage. Or something. I couldn’t even think what one thing it might be that Layla was missing that seems all stuffed into little Ambrosia rocking back and forth. Maybe shame. After I thought of Ambrosia sucking up all the shame, say, I saw her being born feetfirst and grabbing onto Layla’s womb and pulling it out with her.

      I didn’t know what Layla was like before she lost her womb but I’d never seen anything quite like her. She was not pretty but she had the roundest breasts and the roundest firm bottom I’d ever seen. And she had three dresses all made of thin material and hiding nothing of who she was and she never wore panties. But it wasn’t like she was showing off. It was more like that was the way she was made so it was hard to fault her. I think making love to Layla would be like standing in the shade when it’s hot.

      So men who wandered down the tracks just came to her room and she gave of herself. In the time I knew her I counted eighty-seven bums that she made love to. In the beginning I’d hear her scream and I’d think she was being beat. But when I made Jimmy go check, even though he said she was fine, Layla was sore at me for a week. “I was just worried is all,” I told her, and that was soon after I started staying with Jimmy so how could I have known what was what in her life? But that didn’t matter. Even when I explained she wouldn’t say why she was mad that I made Jimmy walk in. It felt like walking in on a doctor’s examination or a priest taking confession I guess.

      So I just started listening to her scream while bum after bum found a night’s worth of relief from whatever it was that kept them walking the tracks. It never just sounded like screams. It sounded like she was screaming at someone. But who? Not the bum, I’d say. Who else was there to scream at? God?

      And I mean any bum could find that night of relief with Layla. It didn’t matter young or old, smelled bad or not, fat or bony. I’d never seen anything like it as I said. I saw men missing limbs follow her into her house. I saw men I knew were retarded, and they never just walked up to the door like the others but she had to call to them while they stood in the corner of the yard and they always looked bashful when they came out and wouldn’t look at me. And I saw men who except for not shaving and being on the tracks could be insurance salesmen for all you’d know. But there was never more than one at a time. That was just the way it was. And I never knew anyone to fight. If a man was already there the others just walked on like they understood the rules.

      I wondered if they knew she didn’t have a womb, and I was pretty sure they didn’t because Layla was never a talker even to people she knew like me and Rose, though for some people it’s true that the people you talk most to are people you don’t know, people at the bus station, for example. I was pretty sure Layla’s bums just went in and did their business and left without a lot of talking. I don’t know where their seed went. There’s a lot I don’t know. But I was born a very curious person. If I had stayed in school I’d have been a scientist.

      Sometimes I wish Ambrosia could talk because she heard every one of the bums and what passed between them and her mama.

      I’ll say again I can’t fault her and wouldn’t want to. When she was alone down at the other end on her couch, staring out at nothing in particular, she seemed heavy, like even standing up was a chore and she was just too tired to do it. Even when she went to church she just sat there looking down, and when she went up for the bread and wine she never looked at the priest, never crossed herself, just walked back to her pew where she didn’t kneel or close her eyes or do anything but stare at the floor. But when one of her bums came along it was the one time she seemed to know what to do, which was interesting to me because as calm as she was motioning for them to go on inside, I’d throw up I’d be so nervous. For them I thought Layla was like shade on a hot day. That’s as good as I can say it.

      The Tooth Fairy’s Castle

      A while back Ambrosia lost her first tooth. We were all sitting on the back porch and the train was roaring by interrupting talk about the best ribs we’d had in Memphis. When it passed there was usually a time before we started up again. But this time just before I was about to say something Layla looked down and said, “You lost your tooth.” And sure enough Ambrosia had pulled out her loose tooth and it was sitting by her on the porch. She had just the slightest bit of blood on her lower lip.

      I saw that Layla looked like she wanted to cry and I thought I understood. I hadn’t seen her look like this before, but you never know what’s gonna make you cry. Most kids get all excited when they lose a tooth but Ambrosia plucked it out like a piece of grit and set it off to one side.

      Then Layla reached down and picked up the tooth and held it up. She said, “You want me to put it under your pillow for you?” and she said it like she was blaming somebody. Ambrosia of course kept rocking and Rose looked out over the tracks with a face that said, How long, Lord, how long?

      Which made me think of a story that a woman from the government who used to visit my mother to make sure she took her infection drugs told me when I lost a tooth. It wasn’t much of a kid’s story I can see now and it scared me at the time. “There’s not much to the tooth fairy,” the lady told me. “She got nothing to do with the day and only works when it’s dark and people don’t see, don’t guard what they think about.

      “She doesn’t talk. And for her, money is nothing more than a way to buy the bones of children. A tooth is a bone and her castle is made of these small bones that children lose to remind everyone that children grow old like everybody. The castle glimmers with a kind of bluish light over the surface of it. There are no windows. The sun shines silver in those parts. Never red. Never yellow.

      “She is tiny. She is so tiny. And each step up to her front door is made of a single tooth. There are a thousand steps to keep away visitors, and twice as many inside, each one from a different child somewhere in the world.

      “She lives alone in the daytime and she sits on her tiny throne at the top of all those teeth in her white lace and tiny white shoes and see-through wings, and she cries. She cries all day long, so much that her tears fall from her face down the smooth surface of children’s bones and in summer they form a pool far below so that the whole castle is reflected. In the center of that liquid mirror is the tooth fairy.

      “In the winter her tears form icicles and by the time the winter is deep it looks like a long white beard hanging from her high perch down to the smooth floor below.

      “She has no one to ask her why she cries because the rule was written that she can only take the tooth of a sleeping child. She has long since had enough bones for her castle with endless empty rooms. So she uses them to build mountains. She has no questions, and she has no idea how happy the children are when they wake up and find the tooth gone and replaced with a coin. She only knows the way things have to be. She doesn’t even know why she cries all the time. But I know.”

      That was it. I just stared at the lady while she went back to checking my mother’s medicines and making sure she took them. Which made me wonder why somebody who would take a job doing that would tell a story like that to a kid. But since then I met enough people who do those kinds of jobs to learn that even things that look like kindness can wear on you like anything else if you don’t get a break sometimes. That’s part of what I thought about with the baby because it was just

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