The New Moon's Arms

by Nalo Hopkinson

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

What's in a name? A lot, according to Caribbean-born Chastity, who has adopted the more fitting moniker Calamity. Now in her fifties, true to her name, Calamity is confronting two big life transitions: her beloved father has just died, and she is starting menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her special gift for finding lost things. Suddenly she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air. Only this time, the lost item that has washed up on the shore is not her old toy truck or her hairbrush, but a four-year-old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems: the boy's family is most unusual. Then Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.

Release date: February 23, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

“A significant figure and a singular talent… A most impressive work, THE NEW MOON’S ARMS has everything a reader could want: a compelling storyline with mysteries at its heart; a firm rooting in myth and history; keen social sense; and, most importantly, a focal character it is impossible not to fall in love with. It is a novel that sweeps the reader into its world: vivid and richly nuanced, utterly realistic yet still somehow touched with magic. Hopkinson’s writing is lush and note-perfect… The dialogue crackles, and Calamity’s narrative voice is direct and winning… one is left with a sense of wonder.”

—Toronto Star

“THE NEW MOON’S ARMS is a dance of lost-and-found. Hopkinson knows not to get too sentimental, thanks in large part to her heroine’s unsinkable sense of humor. It let me hear the mermaids singing.”

—Washington Post Book World

“Considerable talent for character, voice, and lushly sensual writing… her most convincing and complex character to date.”

—Locus

“Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction… [Her] work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption… With sly humor and great tenderness, [she] draws out the hope residing in age and change.”

—Toronto Globe and Mail

“Shows new depths of wisdom, humor, and insight… Like life, Hopkinson’s novel doesn’t resolve every mystery. But Hopkinson has answered the essential questions in THE NEW MOON’S ARMS, and she’s wise enough to know we need nothing more.”

—Seattle Times

Nebula Award Final Ballot Shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award

“A book of wonder, courage, and magic… an electrifying bravura performance by one of our most important writers.”

—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic. A tour de force from one of our most striking new voices in fiction.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Succeeds impressively as a powerful and passionate meditation on myth and survival.”

—Locus

“A brilliant and multilayered tale.”

—Black Issues Book Review

“Whirling with witchcraft and sensuality, the latest novel by Hopkinson is a globe-spanning, time-traveling spiritual odyssey… The novel has a genuine vitality and generosity. Epic and frenetic, it traces the physical and spiritual ties that bind its characters to each other and to the earth.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rollicking, sensual… Required reading… [from] one of science fiction’s most inventive and brilliant writers.”

—New York Post

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection New York Times Best Book of the Year

“Vibrant… stunning… Hopkinson puts her lyrical gifts to good use.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Hopkinson’s prose is vivid and immediate.”

—Washington Post Book World

“An important new writer.”

—Dallas Morning News

“A marvelous display of Nalo Hopkinson’s talents, skills, and insights into the human conditions of life… everything is possible in her imagination.”

—Science Fiction Chronicle

“Hopkinson has already captured readers with her unique combination of Caribbean folklore, sensual characters, and rhythmic prose. These stories further illustrate her broad range of subjects.”

—Booklist

“An ideal place for the new reader to discover her fertile imagination, profound empathy and extraordinary voice.”

—Toronto Globe and Mail

Final Ballot for the Nebula Award Finalist for the Hugo Award New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“Deeply satisfying… succeeds on a grand scale… best of all is the language… Hopkinson’s narrative voice has a way of getting under the skin.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Caribbean patois adorns this novel with graceful rhythms… Beneath it lie complex, clearly evoked characters, haunting descriptions of exotic planets, and a stirring story… [This book] ought to elevate Hopkinson to star status.”

—Seattle Times

“Spicy and distinctive, set forth in a thoroughly captivating Caribbean dialect.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Hopkinson’s rich and complex Carib English is… quite beautiful… believable, lushly detailed worlds… extremely well-drawn… Hopkinson owns one of the more important and original voices in SF.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Employs Caribbean folk elements to tell a story that is by turns fantastic, allegorical, and contemporary.”

—Washington Post

Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel Shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

“Excellent… a bright, original mix of future urban decay and West Indian magic… strongly rooted in character and place.”

—Sunday Denver Post

“A wonderful sense of narrative and a finely tuned ear for dialogue… balances a well-crafted and imaginative story with incisive social critique and a vivid sense of place.”

—Emerge

“An impressive debut precisely because of Hopkinson’s fresh viewpoint.”

—Washington Post

“Hopkinson lives up to her advance billing.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Hopkinson’s writing is smooth and assured, and her characters lively and believable. She has created a vivid world of urban decay and startling, dangerous magic, where the human heart is both a physical and metaphorical key.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Splendid… Superbly plotted and redolent of the rhythms of Afro-Caribbean speech.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly original… the debut of a major talent. Gripping, memorable, and beautiful.”

—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

A CROWD HAD GATHERED AROUND MRS. WINTER. The commotion at the graveside vibrated with suppressed hilarity. Me, I wasn’t able to keep properly solemn. When my shoulders had started shaking with silent laughter, I’d ducked behind the plain pine coffin still on its stand outside the grave.

I bit my lips to keep the giggles in, and peeked around the coffin to watch the goings-on.

Mrs. Winter had given up the attempt to discreetly pull her bloomers back up. Through the milling legs of the mourners, I could see her trying desperately instead to kick off the pale pink nylon that had slithered down from her haunches and snagged around her ankles.

Her kick sent a tiny flash of gold skittering across the cemetery lawn to land near me. I glanced down. I picked up the small tangle of gold-coloured wire and put it in my jacket pocket for later. Right now, I had some high drama to watch.

Pastor Paul, ever helpful, bent to the ground at Mrs. Winter’s feet and reached for his parishioner’s panties. Lord help me Jesus, he was really going to pick them up! But he drew his fingers back. He looked mortified. Maybe he was thinking how the panties had recently been snugged up to Mrs. Winter’s naked flesh. I thought my belly was going to bust, I was trying so hard not to laugh aloud. I bet you Dadda would have laughed with me, if he wasn’t in that coffin right now.

Mrs. Winter got the tip of one of her pumps caught in the froth of pink nylon. She cheeped in dismay and fell heavily to the ground. Lawdamercy! I bent right over, shaking with laughter, trying to not pee myself from it.

Pastor Paul and Mrs. Winter’s son Leroy were pulling on her arms now, trying to get her off the ground. “Oh, Dadda, oh,” I whispered through my giggles. “Wherever you are, I hope you seeing this.” I held my belly and wept tears of mirth. Serve the old bat right for insulting me like that. Not a day went by at work that she didn’t find some sly way to sink in the knife. She had to do the same thing at my father’s funeral, too? Mrs. Winter was halfway up. She had one arm hooked around Leroy’s neck, and Pastor Paul was pushing her from behind. A few of the mourners asked her if she was all right. “Oh, migod,” was all she said; “oh, migod.” My laughter was edging up on hysteria. Too much; death and mirth all at once. I rested my hands on my knees and took little panting breaths to calm myself. I couldn’t hide behind the coffin forever.

At least the tingling in my hand had stopped. A few minutes earlier, standing at the open grave, I’d suddenly felt too warm, and my hand had gotten pins and needles.

I took the scrap of wire out of my pocket. It had been crushed flat. I pulled on the loops of wire until something of its original shape began to emerge. I had a good look at it, and gasped.

I held the pin up against the sunlight. It caught a spark of light, threw blades of sunshine at my eyes. It had gotten warped over the years, forced into service to hold up Mrs. Winter’s loose drawers. It used to be a decorative pin for wearing on a blouse, its gold wire looped in the shape of an ornate C, T, and L: Chastity Theresa Lambkin. My girlhood name. Mumma’d given me that pin for my eighth birthday. Years ago, after they’d declared Mumma dead and we’d had the memorial service for her, little Chastity-girl me had noticed it missing. And missing it had stayed; no time to look for it in all the commotion of the hearing, of moving to my aunt and uncle’s, and the children at school whispering to each other whenever they saw me.

Where in blazes Mrs. Winter had found my pin?

“Mum? What’s going on?”

Ife was standing there, holding young Stanley’s hand. Ife’s black dress hung off her shoulders, its hem crooked.

Stanley gave me a shy little wave.

Ife had gotten the best bits of me and her father combined: the glow of his perfect dark brown skin; his lips, the way they peaked in the middle when he smiled. My dimples, my well-shaped legs. She was plump, like all the women in our family, but that never stopped a West Indian man yet. Not a real man, anyway. If I could just get her to wear clothes that suited her!

Not my Ife. She covered up her charms with baggy, ankle-length dresses in unhelpful colours, slouched around in rubber flipflops or those horrible wide-toed cork sandals from abroad. Been so long since I’d seen her legs, she might as well not have any.

Nothing could hide that smile, though. She turned it on me now, and even though it was an uncertain smile today, it made my world a little bit brighter.

But I firmly squashed the joy at seeing her sweet face, made mine sour. I tucked the warped pin back into my pocket and turned to my daughter Ifeoma, to whom I wasn’t speaking. Well, not really speaking. I mean, I would say ’morning and so, you know, but nothing more until she took back that awful thing she’d called me.

“Mrs. Winter tripped,” I told her as I hugged her. “And you know I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Mum’ like that.” Using the hug for cover, I stroked her back. No bra again. That child had no respect for the dead. And no fashion sense either; that dress! My seventies throwback hippie girl child. At least she wasn’t wearing sandals and socks today, but proper high heels.

“You’re my mother,” Ife murmured into our hug. “It’s not respectful for me to call you ‘Calamity,’ like… like…”

I pulled back and glared at Ifeoma. “Like what? You’d best mind yourself with me. You know I’m vex with you already, after last night.”

Ife pressed her lips together. She used to do that as a little girl when she didn’t want to eat her greens. “… like you’re my sister,” she said quietly.

And just so, she squashed my heart like you crush a piece of paper into a ball you’re going to throw in the trash. I turned my face from her.

Stanley stood at the lip of the open grave, peering in. He pulled at his collar. This might be the first time in his nine years that he was wearing a suit.

“You’re my mother,” Ife said. “Why I can’t just call you ‘Mummy’?”

Last night, she’d called me a “matriarch.” Like I was some wrinkled, prune-faced dowager wearing a hairnet and clothes thirty years out of fashion.

Mrs. Winter was standing all the way up now. She was favouring one ankle. She still had one arm wrapped around Leroy’s neck. The other was around Pastor Paul’s. Mrs. Saranta was fanning her face with a prayer book. One of the ushers, a long, skinny young man with big eyes and hands like shovels, had picked Mrs. Winter’s tiger-print handbag up off the grass and was collecting all the things that had spilled out of it.

We used to be as close as sisters, Ife and I. The night I took her out to celebrate her twenty-first birthday with her first legal drink, the bartender had asked us both if we were of drinking age. And we’d laughed, and flirted with him the whole evening. I didn’t tell him she was my daughter until after I took him home that night and made him call out for God in my bed.

But now I wasn’t just old; I was fully an orphan, too, instead of the half of one I had been for so many decades. And finally, the tears came. “He’s gone, Ife. Dadda’s gone.”

Ife took me into her arms again. “Ssh, it’s all right.” If she’d been irritated with me before, there was no sign of it now. For all I’d tried to teach her, she’d never learned how to hold a grudge good and hard, like a shield.

I let myself sob into her neck for a while. My breath rushed and halted.

Mrs. Winter said, quite firmly, “I want to go home.” Good. Interfering woman was probably too shamed to stay after half the town had seen her smalls fall off. Why she had to come today? Bad enough I had to endure her at work. Mrs. Winter thought it was her job to supervise me into an early grave.

Pastor Paul offered to have one of the ushers help Leroy walk her to her car. But no, she wanted the pastor. He gazed around until he spotted me. He gave an apologetic shrug, held up five fingers, and mouthed, Five minutes? I nodded. The three of them hobbled off towards the parking lot. Now our funeral party could recover some of its dignity. What a pity you all alone in this time of trial, child. Chuh. Never mind her; I’d rather fuck the horse she rode in on.

But that was no proper way to be thinking at my father’s funeral.

“You feeling better now, Mum?”

“Right as rain. But I wish you’d worn something a little more tailored, you know?”

Ife smiled at me, tentatively. “This is my best black dress,” she said. “It’s the one I wear when I want to impress. Stanley, come away from there. You might fall in.”

“I won’t fall,” Stanley replied.

“Come over here, I said.”

He did. I wouldn’t let Ife change the subject, though. I knew her tricks better than she knew them herself. “That dress is black crushed gauze, my darling. You look like a big turkey buzzard flapping through the air.”

Ife’s smile hardened like ice. “So we’re going to talk about my looks again?”

I took her face in both my hands. “Your looks are fine. Why you always so worried about looks? You only need to pretty yourself up a little bit.” I don’t know where Ife got her meek nature from. Not from me. “I keep telling you, Ife; you should have more self-confidence. Shorten the skirts a bit, wear some prettier colours. And show a little bosom. We Lambkin women have more than enough to display.”

Ife glared. “Clifton likes me this way. You’re so old-fashioned, Mummy.”

God, “Mummy” was even worse than “Mum.” And since when was I “old-fashioned”? In high school, the other girls used to call my fashion sense scandalous, and I’d loved scandalizing them.

I could see Pastor Paul hurrying back from the parking lot. I took Stanley’s hand. “Come and say goodbye to Dadda,” I told him. The three of us moved closer to the rest of the funeral party. A trim, dark man, maybe sixtyish, made room for us. Peggy Bruce, who had arrived late, nodded a greeting. Even when we were in school, Peggy had always been late. “We going to start again soon,” I said to the mourners. “Pastor Paul on his way back.”

“Did Michael come?” Ife asked in a whisper.

“Who?” I whispered back.

Now Ife’s eyes had the glint of obsidian. “Michael,” she said, a little louder. “My father.” John Antoni peered at us, hungry for gossip.

“Hush,” I said under my breath.

A kiskedee bird zipped by overhead, laughing its high, piping chuckle at me before flying into the branches of one of the frangipani trees in the cemetery.

Ife said, “I thought you were taking care of the invitations! How could you just not tell him that his own father-in-law was dead?”

I lifted my chin. “Dadda was never Michael’s father-in-law.” Tears that had been on the verge of brimming tipped back into the bowls of my eyes again. The eye water was cold.

“Gran?” said Stanley. “I mean, Calamity?”

Lovely boy. I hunkered down to his eye level, balancing on the spikes of my black stiletto pumps. Huh. “Matriarch.” Could a matriarch do that? “And what can I do for you, my handsome boy?”

Stanley ran into my arms. He was all woodknuckle knees and awkwardness, his hair trimmed short, with a W pattern buzzed into the back and sides. His father Clifton had told me it had something to do with American wrestling on the tv. Stanley and I could chat for hours, about school and comics and food. His mind was like a new country; always something fascinating around the next bend. I didn’t see him as often as I liked. Seemed he always had homework to do on the weekend, or soccer practice. Ife and Clifton kept him busy.

“Does Great-Grandpa look scary?” Stanley asked.

“You can’t even see him,” said Ifeoma, butting in. “The casket is closed. Isn’t it, Mum?”

I inhaled the child’s pre-adolescent smell of spit and sweat. “Yes, my love,” I said to him. “It’s closed.”

Stanley sighed. He looked disappointed. “But I wanted to see,” he said. “Godfrey Mordecai at school said that Great-Grandpa would be a skellington, and he would be scary, and I would be frightened. I wouldn’t be frightened. I want to see, Gran. I want to see a real live skellington.”

“ ‘Skeleton,’ dear.” I felt a smile blooming on my lips. A live skeleton. Stanley was a little unclear on the concept. “Stanley, you have a curious mind. This is how I know you’re my blood.” I rose, smoothed my skirt down, and took his hand. Pastor Paul was scurrying our way. I told Stanley, “Let’s see if we can get the lid on the casket raised for you.” He grinned up at me, and we went to meet the pastor halfway. I took care to mind my ankles in the wobbly stilettos. They weren’t made to walk on grass.

Ife caught up with us. “Mum? Don’t do anything to frighten Stanley, please? He might have nightmares. Mum?”

What a way she overprotected that child!

“Mistress Lambkin,” said Pastor Paul. He was puffing from the exertion. “So sorry for the interruption. Shall we, ahm, continue with the proceedings now?”

He was another one who would never call me “Calamity,” no matter how much I asked him to. But he’d picked the wrong day to cross me. I nodded at him, all meekness. “Yes, thank you, Egbert,” I said in a clear, carrying voice.

Stanley giggled. A man standing close to us hid his smile behind a cough. Egbert glanced around. Oh, yes; plenty of people had heard me. If he hated his bloody name so much, why he didn’t just change it? I had changed mine.

Ifeoma snickered, flicked me an amused glance. Now, that was my girl; the one I’d raised. It was the same grin she’d given me that day in the grocery store, all those years ago.

I had just started working at the library. My first paycheque wouldn’t come for another month. I’d been feeding myself and little Ife on macaroni and cheese, and we’d run out of cheese. How old would she have been then? About seven, I think. We were in the cold foods aisle. I was trying to choose between eggs and a block of cheese. I could get only one of them. I was trying not to look at the packets of chicken, of stewing beef, of goat meat. I couldn’t tell how long it had been since we’d had meat. Ifeoma loved roasted chicken legs. Suddenly my crazy girl child took it into her head to start singing “Little Sally Water” at the top of her considerable lungs, complete with the moves. I was about to scold her when I realised that people were looking at her, not me.

“Rise, Sally, RISE!” Ifeoma had yelled, leaping up from the ground, “and dry your weeping eyes…”

Quickly, while she was turning to the east, the west, and to the one she loved the best, I’d slipped two packets of chicken legs and one of stewing goat into the big pockets of my dirndl skirt. With all the gathered material in that skirt, nobody would notice the lumps. Only then did I order Ife to stop making so much commotion. And damned if the child didn’t straighten up immediately, smooth her dress down, and come and pat one of my pockets! And such a conspiring grin on her face! The little devil had been providing distraction so I could feed us both. I missed that Ife. The sober, responsible one standing beside me at the cemetery now was no fun at all.

Egbert took a solemn few steps back to the graveside. “Everyone, please gather round,” he said.

Ife, Stanley, and I moved to stand beside him. I bent and whispered to Stanley, “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. We just have to finish this part first.”

He gave an eager nod. Ifeoma said nothing, but she made a sour face. I composed myself for the rest of the funeral.

“Dearly beloved,” said Pastor Paul, “James Allan Lambkin has come to the end of his life on this earth, and the beginning of his life with you. We therefore commit his body to the ground.”

When I was nine, Dadda had shown me how to fish. But for months he wouldn’t let me bait the hook myself. He did it for me, because he was afraid I would jook my fingers.

“Earth to earth,” said Pastor Paul.

When I was twelve and woke up one morning to blood-stained sheets and my first period, Dadda ran to the store and brought back a big shopping bag with pads in all different shapes and sizes. He stood outside the closed bathroom door and called out instructions to me for how to put them on.

Ifeoma sniffed and wiped her eyes. Stanley’s bottom lip was trembling. Damn, now I was tearing up, too.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

When I was thirteen and had passed my entrance exams to get into high school, Dadda took me to the big island to celebrate. We went to a fancy restaurant. He bought me ice cream and cake, and drank a toast to me with his glass of sorrel drink.

“In the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

When I was fifteen, I told Dadda that I was four months pregnant. He raged through the house for two hours, calling me nasty names and demanding to know who’d done it. I wouldn’t tell him. He stopped talking to me. He wouldn’t eat when I cooked. On the third day he ransacked my room and threw away all my makeup and nice clothes. On the fourth day I packed a small bag and moved out. Went to the big island and knocked on the door of Dadda’s sister Aunt Pearl and her husband Edward. Auntie Pearl let me know that I had shamed the whole family, but she and Uncle Edward gave me a roof and fed me, and they didn’t lecture me too often. I got a part-time job as a page in the library. Until my belly got too big for it, I worked all the hours they would give me, saved my money. It was Auntie who was with me the day I had Ifeoma. Auntie, and Michael.

I dashed my eyes dry. Old brute. He’d had his ways, but if he thought I was going to get sentimental about him now that he was dead, he was sorely mistaken.

“Amen.”

“Amen,” responded everyone at the grave site.

Pastor Paul turned to me and Ifeoma. “Now we’re going to lower the coffin into the grave,” he said. The word “grave” applied to my father was a shock. I felt it, like a blow over my heart. Dadda was in that box, and now they were going to cover him with dirt. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t make words come out.

“That’s fine,” said Ifeoma to the pastor. “Let’s just do that.”

Stanley was tugging urgently at my wrist. I patted his hand to let him know I understood. “We have a request first, Egbert,” I said to the pastor.

“Yes, Miss Lambki… Calamity?”

Good. He’d managed to force it out. “Pastor Paul,” I said as his reward—when the puppy obeys, you give it a treat—“can we open the coffin, please? I want to see Dadda’s face.” My voice broke on the last word.

“Of course, Mistress… Calamity; of course.”

“Oh, dear,” murmured Ifeoma. She pulled Stanley to her, wiped his face with the corner of her dress. He squirmed. She rummaged around in her handbag; one of those handwoven things made of jute or hay or something ecological of the sort. I gave Stanley a shaky wink. He looked scared and excited all at once.

“Let me give you your asthma medicine first,” said Ife.

“I don’t want it!” he replied, trying to wrench himself out of her hands. “It tastes like ass!”

I snorted, pretended I was blowing my nose.

“Stanley!” said Ife. She gave Stanley’s shoulder a little shake. “You h. . .