by Libba Bray
“What’s the matter with you? Are you playing games?” the man said as Isaiah shook.
The words poured out of Isaiah. “Your bank is gonna fail, mister. You’re going to lose all your money. Every cent. You’ll jump from the roof of a high building and smash yourself down below.”
The man yanked his hand free. Isaiah felt dizzy. Theta was running toward him. The man’s face was scared and angry. “Are you one of them?”
“Come on, Isaiah. Let’s go,” Theta said, cursing herself for using Isaiah’s real name.
“I couldn’t help it, Theta,” Isaiah was saying. Theta had pulled him into the dressing tent, where she sponged his face with cool water.
“Don’t worry,” Theta said. “I can’t always control mine, either.”
Theta wrung out the sponge and returned to her compartment. Once again, there were dried leaves and flower petals all over the floor. Furious, Theta swept up a handful of the crumbling petals and marched off the train, straight over to Evie, who was still decked out in her clown costume and talking to Sam. “Okay. The first coupla times were mildly funny, Evil. Not anymore,” Theta fumed. She shoved the handful of dead flowers into Evie’s hand. “If you’re going to drag half the forest into our compartment, can you clean up after yourself? I’m not your maid.”
“Theta, what’s eating you?” Sam asked.
“Stay outta this, Lloyd. This is between me and Evil.”
“Honestly, Theta. I haven’t the foggiest.”
“You didn’t put those in our compartment as some kinda prank?” Theta said.
“On the level, no,” Evie said.
“Well, then who did?”
SERMON
Viola Campbell strode through the land of the dead in her blue-black coat of many feathers. All were sleeping here, having given up their bounty of electric life to keep the breach open and the King of Crows free to move between worlds as he wished. It all went to him, save for the smallest dregs, just enough to keep the dead hungry and mindless and in thrall to him. Viola did not see him. Under the jaundiced moon, she raised her arms. In life, her elegant hands had been the envy of many as they rested upon her Bible, her eyes closed in prayer. Small, downy feathers sprouted from the backs of them now, and her nails were the sharp, curved claws of a bird. Her voice had become raspy, given to squawks and caws. She did not know how much longer she would have the faculty of speech, and she meant to use it while she still could.
“I would speak,” she said to the diseased elms, to the slugs and maggots riddling the threadbare clothing of the dead, to the dead themselves.
“Speak…” the dead echoed, one voice.
“Yes,” Viola said. “I would tell you a story.”
“Only he tells the stories,” the dead intoned. “Only the King of Crows.”
“Not this story. This is a story of the river.” Viola smiled. A smile was reassuring. The dead settled. “A story of the river. Hear the word.”
The moon shed its cold light on Viola’s shoulders. “The river is a watery sword that cuts the nation in two.”
“The river, the river, the river is a sword,” the dead answered.
“Yes,” Viola said. “Call-and-response.”
“Call. And response.”
CALL: The river is a ghost, a legacy in sediment, in silt, in sorrow.
RESPONSE: The river is a ghost.
CALL: The river flows and swirls, cuts and gouges. It shapes the land. The river is an outlaw. It will not be subdued. It will not be colonized.
RESPONSE: The river is an outlaw; it will not be subdued.
CALL: The river bears the history. What is past is also current.
RESPONSE: The river bears the history.
CALL: The river is a witness.
RESPONSE: Witness!
CALL: Yes. Witness. The river remembers the Spaniard lusting for gold, proclaiming himself a god to those who came first. He cut off their hands and infected them with the pox of violence. The river heard their cries. It does not forget. Beware false gods, the river sang from its depths, and waited. That lustful man died of fever, and his men slipped his body into its watery shroud. The river has the last laugh. Hear the truth of the river!
RESPONSE: Hear the truth of the river!
CALL: Two men in a canoe thought they’d discovered this river. Huh. They didn’t discover nothing. The river is and has been.
RESPONSE: The river is a witness.
CALL: The missionaries and traders. The pioneers and trappers. The politicians and myth-makers. The settlers staking their claims through the hearts of those who honored this land first.
RESPONSE: The river is a witness.
CALL: The army builds its levees, claims victory over the river, but they will never control the great spirit of the waters. Nothing belongs to you, it whispers. The river changes course, digs in. It shapes the land the whole time. The river is not a line but a circle. The river is change, and change cannot be stopped. Change, it sings. Change or be lost.
RESPONSE: The river is a witness.
CALL: The river is a watery sword. It cuts the nation in two. But the nation is already divided. It must be healed. We must heal. Change or drown. Unify.
RESPONSE: Wade in the water.
Viola stopped. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
CALL: The ghosts of the river are awake and angry. They gnaw dirt from their man-made graves. They vomit it up, expose the bones. Too much history to swallow. The river roars with pain, with release. It asserts itself: No more. I will rise up, I will rise up, I will rise up. Hear the word of the river.
RESPONSE: Rise up. Rise up. Rise up. Rise up.
“Rise up,” Viola intoned. “Rise up. Rise up.”
In her clapboard church tomb with the stench of rotting daisies in her nostrils, Adelaide Proctor’s mind stops wandering its labyrinthine halls for just a moment. “Rise up,” she whispers.
Aboard Jake Marlowe’s silver dirigible high in the clouds, Miriam Lubovitch stirs, feeling the itch under the iron shackles at her wrists. “Podnimat’sya,” she says softly, again and again, a phrase carried over rough seas from the old country, a prayer, a battle cry.
Outside the jail where Sister Walker lies on her cot, the protestors shout for justice. “Rise up,” Margaret says into the darkness of her cell.
“Quiet in there,” a guard barks.
In the cell next door, a woman picks up the call: “Rise up. Rise up.”
The King of Crows walks among the graveyards where the dead do not rest easily. “Rise up,” he purrs. “Rise up and join me.”
The ground shakes as the dead obey.
The river rolls on, listening, taking down the history, burbling up its warning as it goes. Not far from that great river, in a small-town church equidistant from a Temperance office and a secret moonshiner’s still, the pews are half-full with parishioners, arms raised, eyes closed, fingers stretching up, searching for a signal from an absent god. The ghosts wander inside, drawn by the light. They take their seats in the back row, waiting.
“Ride on, King Jesus!” the preacher shouts to the rafters. “He is risen! Hallelujah!”
“Hell-elujah,” the ghosts whisper. Unseen, they move among the fervid faithful, touching galvanic hands to foreheads, pulling out life while the people fall to their knees and tremble with this new belief, the sudden, terrible knowledge of what awaits.
“Rise up,” the ghosts groan as the life flows through them and up into the broken sky.
A country road. Men swaddled in white call themselves knights, protectors of the empire. The ghosts of the Confederacy pass the torch, and the men set fire to the night.
On the reservations, the land cries like a refugee for the lost country. The land is choir; it sings a song of truth. In the company towns by the mines, the factories, the mills, the canneries. In the sharecropper shacks out from the plantations. In the small immigrant neighborhoods of the shining cities on the hill. In the watch factories w
here radium girls lick the ends of their brushes and glow like dying stars. Near the factories, the mills, the canneries, the river struggles for breath under the grime. The King of Crows touches staticky fingers to the struggling current. “Rise up.” From fouled waters crawl all manner of misshapen things: Four-eyed frogs with three legs, tumorous tadpoles. Birds, feathers heavy with oil, drown themselves in the shallows. Sickly fish swim past, seeing nothing.
In a dark alley dogs snap at each other over a single bone. They fall upon each other, tearing until both are too injured to eat it.
The river is a witness.
The Eye of Providence stretches a golden hand into Sam as he sleeps. If he were to ask, Henry and Ling could tell him that what we do not face in the light comes for us in the dark. Sam tosses. Turns. He dreams of the white buffalo calf. Its mother mewls into a dark and fractured night, staggering across scorched earth, searching for a safe place to rest among so much death. She is heavy with the weight of life inside her: the bones, fluid, blood; the three hundred days of dreams. So much weight; she can go no farther. Moaning, she lowers herself into a patch of diseased flowers, thrashing, until, with a final push, she expels her child from its gestational dreaming. The white buffalo calf slithers out into this world on a tide of blood. Breath stirs in its new lungs. The mouth parts, ready to make a sound. The calf opens its eyes and sees the bared teeth of the world and the power of the night behind it. It opens its mouth to cry, and the world descends. Sam does not know it, but he is crying. Crying for what is lost. He would cry a river.
The river unifies. The river divides. East and West. North and South. Rich and poor. Black and white. Have and have not. Down to the river and leave your sins behind. Shall we gather at the river?
The hour grows later. Supper dishes have been washed and dried and placed in cupboards. Everything put to order.
“There is no order, no order,” the ghosts cry.
Children with mint-fresh mouths promised in magazine advertisements don pajamas and sit at their parents’ feet. Mama with her needlepoint. Papa with his pipe, a gift for ten years’ service at his good job. Papa turns on the radio. Everywhere in this nation, its eyes and ears on the radios and the amusements it offers: the peppy orchestras, the romantic crooners, the comedy duos, the thrilling serials. It is the national pastime. (It passes the time. So much time and past.) Under the amusements is the thin static of insects, and just under that, the King of Crows whispers like an infection into those eager ears: “We are not strangers, you and I. Search your hearts. I am here, have always been here. You know me.”
“We know you,” the people repeat.
“I am in you.”
“You are in us.”
“Let it rise up.”
“Rise up.”
Papa rises. He descends into his lair, the basement, past the neatly lined-up jars of pickled okra and the tools placed just-so in their metal box. Past the fishing tackle hung upon the wall, to the drawer where he keeps his grandfather’s pistol and the bullets, fitting their gold weight neatly into each snug hole and spinning the chamber, watching the revolutions. The gun is a circle. He rises and enters the parlor, where the radio plays a jaunty tune. The fresh-mint children regard him and the gun curiously. “Papa?” Mama drops her needlepoint and screams. Four bullets later, it’s quiet, except for the blood-spattered radio.
The river is a witness.
America’s favorite son sleeps on. A four-poster bed with beautiful linens. He is far from the river.
“Sleep. Sleep and follow me,” the King of Crows whispers.
Jake Marlowe rises and follows the King of Crows into the desert strobed by harsh white light, as if the sky is a giant camera taking evidence. Atoms dance along the mountaintops, which catch fire. Black smoke curdles the view. The mountains undulate, rise and fall, one wide as a fat man, the next skinny as a little boy.
“Do you know me?” the King of Crows calls.
“Yes,” Jake Marlowe responds.
“I am what you seek,” the King of Crows calls. “I am where you lead.”
“Yes,” Marlowe responds.
In the serrated light, Jake sees a field of ragged, haunted people, mouths open in a scream like a factory whistle. Shadow. Light. Shadow. Light.
Smoke pours from their mouths and nostrils. “This keeps happening,” they say.
White-hot light violates the sky.
Shadow. Light.
They crumble into ash.
Light. Shadow.
Bodies piled in mass graves. “This keeps happening.”
Shadow.
Shadow.
Where is the river? Who will witness?
Jake Marlowe walks out of the desert but he does not leave it.
Theta finishes her last cigarette and stomps it into the ground. She shivers for no reason and boards the sleeping train. Roy and his men drive in the dark, tires circling against the rise of the road. Someone thinks they saw her in Kentucky with a circus, so Roy is going to Kentucky. Roy’s daddy was from Kentucky. He used to beat Roy with a belt buckle. Roy can still hear the clang of metal under the humming tires. His daddy was beat by his own pappy, and his pappy by his father before him. Roy used to joke that their family tree was just a big old belt passing from hand to hand. A circle. Roy thinks of Theta. Thinks of the belt. Presses the gas.
Theta sleeps. Something else is awake. Elijah shuffles up the steps of the train, trailing dead leaves. He finds her cabin. He can always find her. They are bound together now, forever. But not yet. First, a gift. A proper courting. He lays the daisies upon her pillow. They brown and curl under his touch. Worms wiggle under the covers, make a home in the future. Theta sleeps. Elijah strokes a filthy finger down her hair and is gone.
The sky crackles with light. The dead are in the woods. Along the quiet roads. Near the edges of towns. They ask for rides to see a brother in a prison that hasn’t been in use since the Civil War. Or to a town where they plan to be married. These cars will be found later, abandoned. Doors open. Headlamps still on. Perhaps a strange pattern burned into the seats. Scratch marks. Dust everywhere.
The ghosts reach the edges of the towns. The husband rouses from slumber and a dream of sun-stippled valleys for just a moment. “Did you hear that?” he asks his young wife. “Come to me, lover,” she says, taking him in her arms, and the warning is forgotten. There is lightning in the sky. The ghosts step into the streets.
The dead of Greenville float in the river. (“The river, the river is a witness.”) Here and there, a bloated arm catches on a half-submerged telephone pole. Shirttails snag against a section of severed fence. The dead are caught in riptides, swirl around and around, becoming a circle. The call is passed from mind to mind: “Rise up,” they say from the watery depths and float toward the levee.
Rise up, Memphis thinks, his pencil making its own swirls and loops upon the page, forming words. The hands of the ancestors guide his strokes. Witness. Witness. The river travels on, telling the story to any who will listen. It knows the people are unreliable narrators. They do not know themselves.
The radio ends its broadcast. A little music to play it out, burbling through speakers, sweet as a river. This is your radio announcer, wishing you all a pleasant evening. Good night. Good. Night.
Good night to the oil fields smelling of sulfur and profit. And to the miners’ shacks leering lovesick into streams shining up with fool’s gold. Good night to the boomtowns, built in fever dreams, jilted when spent. Good night to Alma’s arm across Ling’s body, the birth of something new. Good night to the railroads carving scars across the land. Good night to the atoms impatient for more, eager to rise up in new horror. Good night to the husband and wife, young lovers, as the dead watch from the foot of their bed. “Hungry,” they whisper. Good night to all. All the asleep with the dead on their doorsteps. All are sleeping.
Only the river is awake. And it is screaming.
RIVER
Memphis woke to Nate Timmons shaking him.
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“Memphis,” he said in an urgent voice. “I heard something you need to know. My cousin say he heard some guards talking. Say there’s some men on their way in from Washington to search the camp. Said they heard some poems from the Voice of Tomorrow had been mailed to a newspaper in New York, and those letters was stamped Greenville. And then they heard about healings taking place on the levee. Those Shadow Men you told me about? They coming for you and your friends, Memphis. You got to go. We got to get you out of here.”
“How we gonna do that?” Bill said, throwing off the thin blanket and pulling up his suspenders. “We need passes to get out.”
“Nate, you were wanting to go north, weren’t you?” Memphis said.
Nate rubbed a hand down his face, thinking. “Remy’s boat would do, I reckon. But we got to go past the guard to get it.”
“The Shadow Men aren’t here yet. And the camp’s eight miles long,” Memphis said.
Bill hurried into his boots. “Better hope they start at the other end.”
Quickly and quietly, Memphis, Bill, and Henry gathered their things. Nate Timmons had Bessie stuff what she could into a pillowcase. She was tearful about having to leave behind even more of what little they had.
Moses and Tobias were worried sick about their dog, Buddy. It had been several days since the levees had washed away, stranding them all in the refugee camps.
“Please, Daddy. Can we go looking for him?”
There was the issue of the passes—the National Guard wasn’t handing them out, except to white people. But two young boys desperate to find their lost dog pulled at the heartstrings of one of the guards.
“I can’t let you go, sir. But I can let the boys out,” explained the sympathetic guard to Nate Timmons. He handed over half his sandwich to the boys. “I got a dog back home, too. Here. He’ll be hungry. Give him this, compliments of me and my Rover.”