Basuma’s arms were covered with brown freckles that made her look like a ripe banana. Her hair was as white as chalk on a blackboard. She lived in our downstairs apartment and had been my grandmother’s best friend.
Mom worked downtown at a bank, but worried about losing her job. It was supposed to be secret. I don’t know why since I’m big enough, only a few weeks before the end of fifth grade. I pulled on shorts and a red tank top and went to the back porch where Basuma was sitting looking at the ivy-covered wall that separated our yard from another house. She wore what she called her bottle jars, eyeglasses that were as thick as two of my notebooks. Something about a childhood accident that had left one of her eyes grey and fuzzy.
“How was school today?” she asked.
I gave my usual answer. “Fine.” I wondered what I was going to do all summer and hoped I wouldn’t be sitting around the house. Some of my friends were scheduled to go camping with their families.
“Who swallowed your tongue?”
I didn’t say anything.
Basuma picked up the conversation and pointed to a tree in our backyard. “Look! The momma bird is feeding the baby bird,” she said, “and the daddy bird is watching out for cats. scrunching itself up into a waiting rock beneath the tree with its mouth open and its tail ticking,” she said, “he flies to the branch and warns his family.”
There were dozens of stray cats roaming in our neighborhood. “But how does a bird learn how to fly?”
Basuma pulled a brown and white feather from her hair and began to fan herself. “By watching the momma bird, sweet pea.” Sweat formed in beads across her forehead. “Sheesh, child, it’s too warm. Let’s go inside.” We climbed down the stairs to her apartment. She had a small fridge where she kept drinks and pulled out two waters.
I sat against the wall and sipped my water while Basuma rocked in her rocker, and pressed her toes back and forth on the carpet. A bed was covered with a crocheted afghan neatly tucked beneath her pillows. There were pictures on the walls of birds, many of them flying over the water. Basuma said they were brown and white pelicans and explained how they delivered newborn babies to parents.
“You’re making that up,” I said.
Basuma folded her fingers into a steeple and opened and closed them several times. “But not about flying. You, see once there was a Bird Woman named Liana.”
“Liana!” I said. “That’s my name!”
“She was nobody’s child and everybody’s child,” said Basuma. Liana was an orphan who had been brought to the village as an infant. But the village was located at the center of a great pool of knowledge,” she said, “where the secrets of the world were stored, but never hidden.”
Basuma’s words poured over me as I looked out her window where a sparrow had landed on the branch of an almond tree. I watched her rock back and forth in her chair. Basuma had mentioned once that that her great-grandfather had carved the rocker from flying maple wood from a tree that grows in Minnesota.
“The pool was reached by a stone path that edged on either side by ferns.” Basuma cleaned her eyeglasses with the edge of her T-shirt, and as if she had read my thoughts, she said, “It wasn’t just the water. People thirsted to know answers to difficult questions.”
I wanted to know why most of my friends had fathers and I didn’t. At 42, my father had died less than a year ago from a heart attack.
“Whoever’s turn it was to visit the pool was led by a single person, la guida. That was the person who carried a silver cup and dipped its rim into the pool, and handed it to the thirster. It was said that the water changed anyone who drank, but not in any way you could tell by looking at them,” said Basuma, “more like something had been rearranged inside—a new strength that comes from understanding.” She put down her water on the small table next to her bed, and brought her wristwatch almost right up to her good eye. “Better start doing your homework,” she said. “Your mother will be home soon.”
“How about after your story?” I loved to read, especially any book about mythology. But ever since my father died, I found it hard to concentrate. Whenever Basuma told me her stories, she expanded with a lighted breath, almost like a balloon lifted by the wind above telephone poles. But suddenly she stopped and waved her hands like she was sending a message into outer space.
“I have to catch the rest of the words.” She stretched her hands and plucked something to her ear and mouth. “There! Now I remember…