Diana and Erzulia conferred. Diana rose and came back with three women of her core. Lovers, sisters, daughters of the moon, they wore the knee‑length white tunics of healers. Their hair was bound back and they bore as decoration the crescent of the moon. Now they carried a cello, a flute, and a drum. After tuning up, they began to play, sitting to one side of Diana, who stood to sing … or keen. Her voice began softly, sobbing, wordless but musical, used like a fourth instrument higher than the cello but lower than the flute. Her auburn hair fell over one shoulder. Tall and bony and commanding, she swayed. Her voice crooned, soared, ululated, wailed, and mourned over the rhythm of the drum. Finally Erzulia rose. She cast off her blue robe and stood in something like a dancer’s leotards, black against her black skin so at first Connie thought her naked. She stood still and then she seemed to grow taller.

She began to dance, but not as Connie had seen her dance the night of the feast. She did not dance in trance but consciously, and she did not dance as herself. She danced Jackrabbit. Yes, she became him. She was tall, bony but graceful, shambling and limber, young and awkward and beautiful, talented and bumbling, pressing off at once in four directions, hopping, leaping, charging, and bounding back.

Bolivar’s head slowly lifted from his chest. He was staring. Suddenly Erzulia‑Jackrabbit danced over and drew him up. Slowly, mechanically, as if hypnotized Bolivar began to dance with him/her. Erzulia possessed willfully by the memory of Jackrabbit led Bolivar round and round. He danced more feverishly, responding, his body became fluid and elegant as he had danced that night of the feast with Jackrabbit–that night she had spent with Bee. Slowly tears coursed down her own face, perhaps more for Skip than for Jackrabbit, perhaps for both, perhaps for old losses and him too and above all for Luciente and the pain tearing her.

The music ended and Bolivar embraced Erzulia. They stood a moment clasped and then Erzulia’s body relaxed. Bolivar jumped back. “But I felt per!” he cried out.

“You remembering,” Erzulia lilted gently, wiping her forehead.

Bolivar crumpled to the ground in a spasm of weeping so sudden that for a moment no one moved to support him. Then Bee and Crazy Horse gently held him, murmuring.

“Good. At last your grief come down.” Erzulia signaled to the people who had served the coffee, and they began carrying around jugs of wine and glasses and picking up the coffee mugs. This time they served everyone else first, to let the pitch of emotion ease among the close ones.

The wine was strong, fiery, with a heady perfume of grape. The jugs were gallons marked “Egenblick of Cayuga Fortified After Dinner Wine,” and they passed around plenty of jugs. Enough to get everyone well drunk, she thought, noticing there were many other jugs waiting. In fact, the tension did seem to be lightening. People were chatting quietly, blowing noses, wiping tears, and putting handkerchiefs away, hugging and talking more. Bolivar sat down and cried in short but lessening spasms. His spine had relaxed. His face was crinkled. His head lay on the thigh of Crazy Horse.

Erzulia said something to the three musicians with Diana, and they began playing a different kind of tune, bittersweet, sweet and sour, it ran. Erzulia and Diana sang together, their voices turning and crossing in the air like swallows. Diana’s voice was deeper, Erzulia’s sweeter and more piercing. They twined and separated in easy counterpoint in the song Connie remembered from the nursery:

“Nobody knows

how it flows

as it goes.

Nobody goes

where it rose

as it flows.”

That lullaby. Everybody began to sing it, they all seemed to know it. It made a slow wave of soft singing over which the voices of Erzulia and Diana rose and dipped.

“Nobody knows

how it chose

how it grows … .”

The children joined in, swaying back and forth as they sang words that seemed familiar to all, from babyhood, from mothering and caring for the young. The flute skipped off in a dance of its own high over the voices, and Erzulia and Diana fell back to listen. Other instruments joined in here and there in the hall. The improvising rose in intensity, trailed off, seemed to stop, and then began again in a guitar or recorder.

Finally the song dwindled. Barbarossa spoke thoughtfully. “The holi Jackrabbit made that warmed me most was the one for green equinox, with all the speeded‑up plant growth. For days after I kept remembering the little sprouts wriggling out of the seeds, the tulips unfolding, shutting, opening, shutting. It was funny and beautiful at once. Those images kept coming back when I was working and I’d smile. It gave me a good connected feeling.”

“The smile on the faces of kores,the youth and maidens, the archaic smile. Jackrabbit was … moved by that smile,” Bolivar mused. He had stopped crying. His face was soft. He leaned on Bee, his head lolling like a sleepy child. “Was my sabbatical and Jackrabbit had not yet settled down. We went to Greece for threemonth. Person was fifteen, more like a cricket than a rabbit. Skinny. Person could eat and eat and nothing would show. Was spring–end of March. Wildflowers everyplace. Crete was velvet to us. We worked on reforesting, we stayed with shepherds, and Jackrabbit was sketching everybody and giving the drawings away. I remember vermilion poppies under gray‑green olives, young and black kids that wanted their foreheads rubbed where the horns were going to come through. Dittany growing wild. The pigment factory where we stayed a week, doing odd jobs. We were in love with Minoan wall paintings. An outbuilding at Minos had ridiculous imaginative birds on the murals. Marvelous. Pure velvet. We decided we too would invent unlikely creatures in holies we were even then starting to plan … We decided to build a house, such a house as that one at Minos. A distance away from the others and with a view of the mountains and vineyards. Painted all over and open to the sun.”

Bolivar smiled weakly. “A few days later we were traveling by donkey up near Dicty, when we saw those birds. They’re called hoopoes in English. There they were, exactly the birds in the Minoan guesthouse. A pinkish brown with black and white striped wings and tail like flying zebras, just flashing at you as they undulate ever so slowly, fluttering across clearings. On their heads an Indian‑chief headdress of brown‑and black‑tipped feathers stands straight up when they want it to. We laughed so hard we fell off the donkeys. And they fluttered away slowly and tantalizingly, rebuking us for not having believed in them. Pooh! Pooh! they cried at us. Ah, the imagination of those ancient Cretans, Jackrabbit said, and for years that was a catch phrase between us … .”

He sighed, shrugging. “We saw the work of a holist in Agios Nicolaus who fluttered us. Something … fluid about per work. A top spectacler with eight students studying there. I could see Jackrabbit was tempted. That obsessed me jealous, for I viewed myself as Jackrabbit’s teacher as well as lover. I bound more jealous yet when Jackrabbit coupled with per. I had believed, I’d wished, that Jackrabbit would also be drawn only to the male body–so that we’d be alike … . I remember those months so vividly, day by day. We were never closer. Yet the differences stuck out. Always I wanted Jackrabbit to be more like me than person was … . That must have been a strength of your friending, Luciente, that you didn’t want per to be like you. That was almost unique for Jackrabbit.”

“Ah, Bolivar!” Luciente stirred as if shaking herself. “We each loved Jackrabbit and had great richness and great pleasure and now how we ring with pain. What more could we have asked? Except that it last! But what we had …”

The wine went round, the makings of joints began to be passed, marijuana and several other weeds they smoked, the trays with delicate papers and carved pipes. One of the healers was playing the flute again and Diana sang. Luciente was leaned propped sideways against Diana, humming with them. The pressure of her grief was gradually softening. Connie could feel Luciente’s pain flowing like a stream rather than a waterfall smashing on her.