by Joan Brady
‘Dotter, come here,’ Jason said. Dotter lifted her apron and hid her face in it. ‘Look at that back, Alvah. With a back like that a man don’t need a horse. Just take a look at those hips – the hips of mother earth. Think of the children to come from hips like those.’
Women often pulled plows. It was customary. Kids were for hoeing the rows; if they were lazy you beat the shit out of them. Dotter smiled: she was of her time, too – and at that, only a woman who couldn’t read. Her mouth curled into a Cupid’s bow, and the pipe rolled across her teeth, scattering sparks and ashes. It was a strong back, no doubt about it. Alvah’s heart beat a little faster, but he said nothing.
‘Tell you what,’ Jason said. ‘I’ll toss in a pouch of tobacco seed.’
‘What kind?’
‘Colory – the best.’
‘Two pouches,’ said Alvah.
The marriage took place a week later. Alvah and Wife – or Wify as Dotter became known on her wedding day – worked their way across the country, hiring out to farmers while the warm weather lasted and to railroad builders through the winter. When they reached Sweetbrier the next summer, Benbow Wikin’s General Store & Post Office already carried most anything people wanted. Not that anybody wanted much – salt, honey, cream of tartar, molasses, vinegar and the occasional whole codfish, salted and dried, over which flies swarmed as thick and hungry as any newcomer’s passion for land. Benbow was the local land agent for the government; he helped Alvah find ground to squat on. Alvah, true to his chosen kind, was no man of vision. He dreamed of one day growing tobacco worth nine cents a pound down at New Orleans; he dreamed of one day living in a house made of wood – no more. Wify dreamed of nothing. She was too tired to dream. She swept, cooked, spun, wove, washed, kept chickens, grew vegetables, had babies – and pulled the plow.
Alyoshus came first, then Cathern less than a year later; then several stillbirths. The third child who lived was George, the future Senator Stoke himself. After he was born, Wify’s great hips ceased to deliver. But she would not give up. Nor would Alvah: he serviced her from the rear because it was faster and because the genes that made her youngest son hideous in old age showed themselves early in her. No more babies came of it. Wify wept. Alvah showed no reaction. Was he a he-man of his time or was he not? But it rankled. It was breach of contract, this unexpected barrenness, and a breach of contract has to be punished.
So it was as much revenge as the need for extra labor that led him to advertise in the Overland Sentinel, for a boy that wanted buying.
3
Two children waited at Benbow Wikin’s that Saturday afternoon in September of 1865 after the ad appeared. As soon as Alvah arrived, Benbow drew him aside.
‘You don’t want that one, Alvah.’ Benbow gestured toward a scrawny child with fever spots on his cheeks. Alvah nodded agreement.
The second child had black hair that curled over his collar and blue eyes that looked out eagerly at everything around him. This is conjecture: this is what I was like as a child – or so I’ve been told anyway. The child chattered to himself, swinging back and forth at the end of a bearded man’s arm.
‘That’s your boy,’ Benbow said.
‘Wikin Store. Wikins Tor,’ the child chattered. ‘Rudabega and Potata—’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Alvah asked Benbow.
‘Don’t know – always going on like that. Don’t mean anything.’
The child skipped in a small circle around the bearded man, who turned in a circle himself to keep hold of the child’s hand. ‘No, no. No tomato. Bega, tata, no tomata—’
The bearded man’s ragged uniform and battered army boots told Alvah most of what he wanted to know. He kneeled down beside the child.
‘Mama makes a baked potata – mama bakes—’
‘Quiet,’ Alvah said, laying his head against the bib of the child’s overall. The little boy held still. Alvah thumped him on the chest and then on the back.
‘Kinda small,’ Alvah said. He pressed open the child’s mouth and peered at his teeth. ‘Ain’t no six years old. Four at most.’
The veteran said nothing.
Alvah got to his feet. ‘Fifteen dollars,’ he said.
The veteran looked down at the child, up at Alvah and back to the child again. Then he nodded.
Benbow drew a sheet of paper out from under his till and bent down to write. The veteran watched without moving. The little boy danced around, peeking into sacks, squeezing himself between barrels, chattering as before. Then Benbow said, ‘What this document says is this: “For a payment of $15 to Daniel Carrick, Private, US Army, the boy Jonathan Carrick is bound out to Alvah Stoke until the boy is age 21 years.”’ Benbow glanced at each of the men in turn. ‘“When 21 years, he gets $25 and a saddle. Signed Alvah Stoke and Daniel Carrick.” Acceptable?’
Both men nodded.
‘Well then, that’s official. Sign here, Alvah.’ Alvah lettered his name. ‘And here, Daniel Carrick.’ The soldier drew a cross.
So it was that my grandfather was sold and bought as a slave, and so it is that I, who am as white as they come, can lay claim to kinship with most American blacks. There are many others like me: bounding out – although comfortably forgotten these days – was a common practice in its time. There’s more than just the fact of slavery, too: my family tree stops short at this deed of purchase. Nobody ever located the bearded man again. Nobody even knows for sure that Daniel Carrick was his name.
Alvah took his new acquisition out to the wagon. As he drove away he found doubts forming. Why had the veteran been so willing? The more he thought the more it seemed to him that the veteran might have taken ten dollars, maybe even less. He certainly needn’t have committed himself to that saddle. He began to feel he’d been cheated.
Jonathan sat in the back of the wagon, arranging and rearranging a few bits of stray hay in front of him. ‘Clip, clop, wagon hop,’ he sang. ‘Hip, hop—’
‘Shut up,’ Alvah said.
Jonathan fell silent, but a few minutes later he began again softly. ‘Never stop. Never, never – never, never—’
Alvah’s children didn’t chatter that way. Not Alyoshus or Cathern or George. Suppose the boy was unhinged. Weak-minded. Alvah had read stories about boys who set fire to haystacks and did no work.
‘Shut up,’ he shouted, turning from his reins to clout the child across the ear. He slipped as he turned, and the blow was harder than he’d intended. Jonathan let out a yelp and began to bleed from the mouth.
‘Shut up!’
The child shut up.
4
‘I’ve got his diaries in the attic,’ Atlas said in the middle of a sentence about something else. ‘Would you like to see them?’
‘Diaries?’ I stuttered. ‘Your father wrote diaries? You have them? You’re not – I never heard about any such thing. Are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I’ve had them for years. There was a whole load of junk – didn’t know what to do with it. So I just put it up in the—’
‘Are they complete? His whole life, or what? God, I’d love to – They’re really here? Right here in this house?’
Atlas shrugged. ‘Yeah. I didn’t know whether you’d be interested or not. See, that’s one of the funny things: they’re in code. I always figured I’d get down to cracking it one day – but somehow—’
‘Code? Really? Why’d he do that?’
Atlas shrugged again. He’d been a handsome man once, my uncle Atlas. ‘I was so good-looking,’ he said to me, ‘it gives me shivers to think about it.’ Even pushing eighty, with jowls and trifocals, he had the air of an old-time movie idol.
‘Atlas, go get them. I’ve got to see them. I can’t wait another minute.’
He pulled his bulk out of his chair and disappeared. His office was a mess, a heap of papers trailing over the edge of his desk, old files open and strewn over the examining table. It drove the efficient Claire mad. Atlas was a much-married man.
‘She’s not
hing but a white-haired old lady,’ said my aunt Ruth in disgust when Atlas announced his decision to take on Claire. Ruth was Atlas’s only surviving sister at the time (dead now, too, like the rest). ‘What’d he possibly want to marry a white-haired old lady for?’
He returned with an armload of books. There were five volumes of diaries. Five! In Babylonian times five was the secret of the universe. Five was in fact the number of Atlas’s wives and the number of Claire’s wines, too, as exclusively prescribed by Reader’s Digest. Five is the number of the Pentagon in Washington: of war. Five is the pentagram, and out of the pentagram you conjure the devil, which was most assuredly what I hoped to do. Fairly thick volumes, in clean condition, not matching, no attempt even to try for a match. The first – each had a date on the spine – was a ledger, bound in horsehide. The middle three are various sizes of cloth-bound. The last, the greatest treasure of them all, was a paper-backed school exercise book from Woolworth’s.
My grandfather’s hand was not an easy one: angular, jerky, letters written at high speed, often not wholly formed, as though the thoughts had flown by him so fast that he’d never had time to reflect on them. But the code was simple. I could see that at a glance. I’ve always been interested in codes: I like secrets. Back in England in front of my computer – a week after this day of taping that had just begun – it took me under half an hour to crack it. The earliest entries, plainly written many years afterwards, have to do with that afternoon in Wikin’s Store and the first week with the Stokes. Even when Jonathan strained with all his might to remember, he says he could bring to mind nothing of his life before he became a slave, not a face or a voice or a room, not a single image. He’d gone willingly to the spring wagon, though. He’d even delighted in the prospect of a ride in it. When Alvah hit out at him for his babbling, he’d been more puzzled than anything else. It was nearly six o’clock when Alvah reined in the horse and jerked his head in the direction of the lean-to that served the homestead as a barn.
‘Do you live in a shack?’ Jonathan said, climbing down to the ground. ‘Why do—’
‘Quiet, boy.’ Alvah led Jonathan to the door of the soddy.
When Alvah and Wify had arrived in Kansas years before, there was grass from one horizon to the next, no big trees, no rocks, no adobe, nothing to build a house with, only a few caves – and these already occupied. They’d built the sod hut themselves. Wify pulled the plow with a special device attached; Alvah sliced the surface from an entire acre of ground to make the hut. The walls were solid dirt bricks, weighing a hundred, two hundred pounds each, and heaved into place without tools or levers. The roof was cottonwood and more sod. Inside the hut, Alvah, Wify, the children, a pig, the mice, the bugs, the damp, the weeds that straggled from the ceiling: all lived together.
‘You live in a little square hill,’ Jonathan said, ‘with a little square door—’
‘Quiet!’
There was one tiny window: the room was dim even though it was still bright outside. Wify was an enormous, draped figure, bent over a kettle that hung above the coals in the fireplace. There was a cloud of steam. The figure turned, revealing its unbaked-dough of a face lit up by the red from the fire.
‘What a big lady!’ Jonathan cried and then clapped his hand over his mouth, remembering that he wasn’t supposed to talk.
‘This the boy?’ Wify said irritably.
She was even bigger face-on than from the rear; huge shoulders, huge breasts, huge hands. She maneuvered the great bones inside her body as though she were still straining at the yoke. She’d borne her children alone; she’d dug the graves for the stillborn herself. The vast shoulders shivered with resentment.
‘Don’t see no point in a boy,’ she said, turning back to her kettle. ‘Could have got a calf – or another pig—’ Her voice faded into a querulous mutter. Jonathan tightened his grasp on Alvah’s hand.
‘Let go,’ Alvah said.
In the middle of the room stood a large dry-goods box, turned upside down to make a table. Alvah seated himself on a crate next to the box, held a newspaper up toward the window and started to read. Old newspapers, rotting from damp and age, covered the walls and gave off a sour reek. A boy about Jonathan’s own age crept out from a corner of the room.
‘What’s he called?’ the boy said.
This was George Stoke, the senator-to-be himself, eyes aglitter as he flicked them over Jonathan, who was at once enchanted by what he saw. Childhood pictures of George show a plump, animated little boy with little round legs and little round eyes, shiny and black.
‘What’s he called?’ George asked again.
‘Jonathan Carrick,’ Alvah said.
George circled Jonathan, who held very still for the moment of judgment.
‘Carrick, Darrick, Farrick!’ George said at last. Then he poked Jonathan’s nose.
The most angelic of children sustain passions that would kill their elders; only physical weakness – though fortunately they’re also inept – keeps them from acting out what they feel. And George was not one of the most angelic. The blow was nothing, but Jonathan, after the wild-animal fashion of his kind, had caught a whiff of George’s soul. He turned and dashed toward the door.
Alvah reached out and swung him back.
‘This is our house,’ George crowed. ‘Never yours! Ours!’
‘Food’s on,’ Wify said.
George climbed onto one of the crates that served as benches for the box table. Alyoshus and Cathern appeared from behind a bed. Cathern had red pigtails; Alyoshus was round all over. Wify doled out stew onto tin plates, and the family shoveled it down as fast as they could. Jonathan stood silent and watched.
‘What’s the matter?’ Wify demanded. A gobbet of stew flew out of her mouth and arced across the room in Jonathan’s direction. ‘Food not good enough for him?’
‘Eat, boy,’ Alvah said.
Almost before he knew what was happening, Jonathan was at the door again. This time he kicked and scratched when they tried to stop him. Wify caught both his wrists in one of her great hands and both his ankles in the other. She trussed him with a rope; when she let go, his thrashings were so violent that they bounced him across the tiny room.
‘Switch, George,’ Alvah said.
At the first blow Jonathan stopped his struggles to stare at Alvah. Even as he watched Alvah’s arm lift into the air for a second blow, he couldn’t believe it. When the switch hit the third time, he cried out.
Alvah nodded and put the switch away.
The next day, after Alvah and the Stoke children went out to the fields, Jonathan lunged for the door whenever Wify took her eyes off him. He beat at the dirt walls with his fists. Before she went out into the fields herself, she drove a stake into the floor of the soddy and tied him to that with the halter she’d hoped she might be using to tether a calf instead. He remained tied up for the rest of the week. He drank because he did not know how to resist the liquids they poured down his throat, but he would not eat. Every day he fought the halter. Every day Alvah beat him.
At the end of the week, on a blustery afternoon when the Stokes were out in the fields, he managed to jiggle the stake out of the ground. Outside the door, a track disappeared into the grass. He dashed along it, trailing stake and halter behind him. The grass was higher than his head on both sides; it swung back and forth in great billows, and he lost the track. When he found it again, he ran down it – only to find himself back at the door of the sod hut where Alvah stood, switch in hand.
The following day Alvah took him to Sweetbrier and Benbow Wikin’s store.
‘Tell him about his ma,’ Alvah said, depositing Jonathan (who was still trussed up in the halter) on the counter.
‘You don’t got to tie him up, Alvah,’ Benbow said. He was a small man with a pouter pigeon chest. ‘It ain’t official, tying boys up.’
‘He’s mine, ain’t he?’
‘Well, yes, ’course he is, but—’
‘Tell him.’
‘
You go out while I tell him.’ Alvah didn’t move. ‘I ain’t saying nothing while you’re here.’
‘I want to go home, Mister Wikin,’ Jonathan said as soon as Alvah left.
‘Oh, dear—’ Benbow began to loosen Jonathan’s hands. ‘It’s sort of complicated. See, I didn’t rightly know your ma. She come to town only on her own, sort of, a week or so before you come here to, uh, meet Alvah. Nobody’d ever seen her before. I don’t even rightly know how she got here. No horse or buggy or nothing. Just appeared that day. Out of nowhere.’
‘Where is she?’
Benbow went to work on the rope that bound Jonathan’s feet. ‘You been with Alvah most of a week now, ain’t that right? Well, uh – she didn’t know what was to become of you. I’m not even sure—’ He broke off and stroked Jonathan’s hair.
‘Where is she, Mister Wikin?’
‘See, Jonathan, I ain’t even sure Carrick was her name. Or yours. I got the feeling, sort of, that she and him just made it up. I mean, it’s a good name, and that’s official, but—’ He broke off again.
‘Where’s that man?’
‘What man? Alvah?’
‘The man! The man!’ Jonathan insisted.
‘You mean your pa? If he was your – I don’t know. Only time I ever saw him was when he came here with you. Gone west, I suspect. California probably. That’s where most of them go.’
‘Where’s my mama? Where is she, where is she?’
‘Well, Jonathan, see, that’s the thing. How can I find your people if I don’t even know your right name?’
‘I’m Jonathan,’ Jonathan said, fears momentarily giving way to the abrupt anger that was to mark his character all his life. ‘Where is my mama?’
‘Oh, dear, oh, dear – But Jonathan what? What’s your last name? Can you tell me?’