The Salt Fields

by Stacy D. Flood

  As light as her heart was, she broke next. Spring came quickly that year. She was eager to get out and play in the new grass and dandelions and burgeoning fields. She collected seeds in her pockets in hopes that the warmth of her skin would help them grow. She spent the warm evenings trying to collect fireflies, and as the sky softened to black, she would spell out her future by using the tip of her finger to connect one star to the next, her own form of celestial fortune telling.

  There were few fences in town. Like dwellers in African deserts, everyone knew where their borders lay; they didn’t need to be marked. My daughter went where she pleased. But she didn’t notice the frost that had gathered so late in the year on the stones of the Richardsons’ well. She climbed onto the edge, as she had done spring after spring, summer after summer of her youth, her small arms outstretched as if it were her time to soar.

  Then she fell twenty feet through the darkness and died minutes after she reached the water below. Drowned. Usually, they say, it’s the impact, the cold surface, that kills you—snaps the neck; you suffocate in another way. But the coroner told me that water had filled her lungs first, that she had drowned—or maybe that was the quickest answer and he was too lazy to look into things further. I imagined her slipping easily into the water and the darkness, letting it fill and envelop her, carrying her to her mother, carrying her home.

  What alerted me that something was wrong that afternoon was the silence, the change in signal-to-noise; that stillness was different from what had shrouded us in previous months. Everyone thinks that all quiet is the same kind of emptiness, but it isn’t. There’s one type of quiet when you’re hiding yourself and another type when the world is instead pulling away from you. I rushed to the well when I noticed the latter.

  Maybe if I would have been even slightly more attentive as a father, she wouldn’t have died, cold and alone in the dark. I’d learned to shut out her footsteps, her scratches, and the little songs she’d sing softly to herself throughout the day. I don’t keep ghosts, but the silence from that moment has stayed with me forever.

  I didn’t go to her funeral. I made the arrangements, chose the casket and her finest dress, and purchased all the flowers, including her favorites (people wondered about the wildflowers and weeds), but I couldn’t bring myself to attend. I thought it would be redundant: between my wife’s memorial less than two years prior and my grandmother’s obsession with funerals, to which I was her constant companion as a child, I was convinced that people were tired of seeing me at solemnities. I stayed at my job for the day. Walking home late that afternoon, I saw a flock of thrushes leap from the tall grass and rise towards the sunlight; as they turned in the sky, I was convinced this vision was all the religion I needed.

  And although I didn’t stop teaching, nor leave town, I drifted away. The days moved; I ate my meals alone, and no one spoke to me, the people of the town thinking me either cursed or tragic—both options equally flawed. The Richardsons’ property and its well dried up after the place was sold, and eventually there were fewer and fewer children around for me to teach. I think everyone expected someone new to arrive, or someone from my past to return, to console me, to give me some morsel of wisdom or joie-de-vivre, but I didn’t hold out much hope for that. Some nights I would buy a jar of white lightning moonshine and sit on the porch, watching the stretches of road in either direction for signs. Somewhere over the years I’d misplaced my father’s almanac and the hole inside it filled with promise, and I spent long nights just waiting for someone to return it to me safe and full.

  In the summer of 1947—amidst radiant poppies, citrus-tinged sunshine, and a clay-white sky—they found a mass grave in the next county. It was determined that it was an infant graveyard from the time of slavery, each skeleton curled into itself in a fetal position as if for warmth and protection. From that moment on I saw the ghost of my daughter all around me, day and night, in every periphery and shadow, and I could no longer sleep without calling her name. In the winds I heard her name, and I thought of the thrushes. In my memory, amongst the rustle of their wings, I now heard my daughter calling ‘Daddy.’ It was as if it took her own beloved spirit, released alongside those of so many who were buried before her, for me to realize how truly lonely I was and how much I wanted to see her face just once more.

  It was then that I decided to leave, to travel north for the promise of great, steel-bending jobs and the opportunity for a different life, or at least fewer ghosts in the night air. I missed my daughter. I missed my wife. I missed my father. I missed my grandmother. And yet I had no desire to keep smelling the acrid detritus in the soil everywhere I stood.

  Because, more than anything, I do believe in crossroads, and sometimes you have to heed their call no matter who you might meet there.

  * * *

  All the following week I had dreams of traveling—of the earth moving beneath my feet, then away from me—which the old folks in town always said was a sign you were going to die. But I think that in their dreams they found themselves collecting their belongings for a journey; in mine, I just left.

  That Sunday I went to church and announced that I was selling my house and moving onward. I wasn’t fearless, just determined. After the service a few parishioners inquired as to my asking price, and what time would be best for them to come by and take a look, but no one asked where I was heading or why. Also—and understandably, since most of the families in town were struggling to keep the little that they had—no serious offers came.

  People disappear in the South, one way or another. In the Black sections it’s rare when anyone goes searching for them, so I think it surprised the town that my departure was so deliberate, considering all the other mysterious possibilities. The Lawson family lived only a few houses away and had done so for most of my life. When the parents died, the oldest son took over the house with his wife and family, and they were kind to my new family, then my tragedy. There was a cottonwood in their backyard that I would climb when I was in grade school, but then one hard autumn a storm blew the tree over and it was cannibalized in order to keep the rest of the town warm.

  Ronalda Lawson was only fourteen when she had a child with Oscar Wheatts, whose previous wife had died from pneumonia the year I went to college. Oscar had a car, which he polished as often as his days would allow, and a job in a car garage close to the white part of town, where he was respected as one of the best mechanics in town, Black or white. He had no children, and although at times he could be heard singing in the street after a night of drinking, he mostly kept to himself, clapped softly in church, and didn’t mind being seen wiping a tear from his eye when a sermon touched his heart.

  Oscar was free with his time and money, and since Ronalda’s parents had nine children, he had the means to give Ronalda the kind of attention that her family could never afford. Ronalda wasn’t very pretty, but she had a smile that could light up your soul.

  There was never really any talk of the two getting married until the baby came, and then Oscar disappeared. Even though his car was gone, he’d left the rest of his belongings behind, which led some to believe there was a degree of foul play involved. Ronalda, though, was convinced he’d simply chosen the nearest breeze in the middle of the night and driven into it, then away.

  I went to see Ronalda at her parents’ house. For my visit the family set out an entire dinner, complete with a cobbler cooling on the windowsill; I think they half-expected me to invite Ronalda to leave with me. Throughout the meal Mrs. Lawson bounced her grandbaby on her lap. After dinner, I politely folded my linen napkin in front of me; at that small motion it seemed the entire house surged forward, waiting for me to speak.

  “I’ll be leaving town soon,” I said.

  “You’ll be missed,” Mr. Lawson lied, while Mrs. Lawson went to the bureau to pull out a box of cigars. “The school has never seen a finer teacher.”

  “Thank you.” Though it was insincere,
the compliment made me uneasy, and I took a sip of water to collect my composure. “I’ve been trying to get rid of my house,” I continued, moving the crumbs from my biscuit around my plate while the youngest Lawson girl cleared the porcelain gravy boat and the pitcher of iced tea from the table.

  “That has always been a fine house,” Mrs. Lawson said. “Your wife, Lord keep her soul, kept that house so nice. And every year she would plant those posies in the front yard. They were so pretty. And the roses. Beautiful. She had a way with them. I still don’t know how she got those roses to bloom that way.”

  “Your wife was a fine woman,” Mr. Lawson interjected.

  “Yes, she was,” Mrs. Lawson added. “Your daughter was a fine child, too. Poor thing.”

  “I’ve been trying to get rid of the house,” I repeated. “But I haven’t gotten any good offers.”

  “Well, money’s kind of tight around here,” Mr. Lawson said. He crossed his legs; only then did I notice his freshly polished spats. “But that new mill should open up soon. What you could do...”

  “I was wondering,” I interrupted, “if Ronalda would be interested in taking the place for me. Free of charge, of course. The stove is good and there’s no draft through the floor or the walls. All the pots are sturdy and clean, and the plants are still alive. And the flowers.”

  The room fell to a silence where you could hear the breeze in the curtains and the bumblebees buzzing in the afternoon light—each casting a tiny shadow as it passed, then disappearing.

  * * *

  The morning I left, as I was packing, I saw Ronalda walking up the road to my house in her finest dress, a melding of crinoline and cornflower-blue linen, carrying two suitcases. I met her at the door and apologized for not having left sooner; that morning I’d slept longer than I anticipated or wanted to, as if there were, after so much pain, a peacefulness in the house that I wanted to collect and take with me. She smiled that wonderful smile and in turn apologized for arriving so soon. I immediately gave her the keys. I didn’t ask where her baby was.

  So we worked around each other as the sun crept upward through an azure sky. I packed as much as I could—my grandmother’s quilt, a rose petal from the garden, more than I thought I would need—into my only suitcase, which was designed more for style than transport. While unpacking her few things, Ronalda straightened the items I was leaving behind. We spoke little but smiled when we passed by each other, and from the wistfulness in her eyes it seemed that she would have rather left with me than acquired a lonely house free of charge. I packed what was left of last evening’s cornbread and spare ribs into my tin lunch pail, and when I was ready to leave I told her goodbye; she kissed me on the cheek and, without saying a word, went back to refolding the linen in the china closet, now all hers.

  I wore my best pin-striped suit to the railway station, with the same chestnut and white two-toned spats that I’d worn to my graduation and wedding. In the front breast pocket I placed a small photograph of my daughter—crumpled at the edges, creased across the middle. I hadn’t realized how much weight I’d lost until I wrapped that suit around me and tied a loose half - Windsor knot into my tie. The suit itself was fawn in color—linen, with cloud-white pinstripes, totally wrong for my complexion, I’d been told—but it was comfortable, and for me it represented the chrysalis from which I was to emerge.

  Once I descended the three stairs from the front porch to the concrete walkway, the other steps came quickly. I meant to turn around for one last look, but by the time I thought to do so I was over a block away and couldn’t see the house anymore.

  From there I kept walking—past sunflowers, fields of wilted grass, bales of autumn hay, even the Richardson property—without breaking stride. The farther I walked, the more the colors around me softened. By now, though, most of the farms were little more than sand and rotting plywood. The only voices were cicadas that fell silent as I approached and began their whispers again when I had passed. At the edge of my vision I saw the well—the police had warned us not to use the water for a few days after they’d removed my daughter’s body because, sometimes, a body can contaminate the supply. Sometimes some of the skin stays behind.

  The emptiness in my suit allowed for a degree of cushioning against the sun; my heels scrapped against the bone-pale, dead-white dust and loose rocks, and for the first time in my life I couldn’t find a rhythm to my steps. I didn’t whistle, nor hum, and my mouth dried, my throat grew parched, and that was okay with me, since I couldn’t find a single reason why I’d ever need to speak again. For those I’d left behind I knew my voice was already a memory, and I knew that this place, my home, would forget about the rest of me as soon as my shoes left the pebbles beneath them.

  * * *

  Even when I was a child, trains never held much fascination for me, and as an adult I’d never bought into the romance or mysticism that said they could take me to a utopia beyond my current vision. I just needed one to take me to someplace slightly better, far away, where I could try to forget the rest of myself and replace it with whatever was around me.

  The railway station was obscured by swirls of dry afternoon and glazed sunlight. Cars edged into the parking lot, the hum of their engines choking in dust, following ruts formed by similar slim white tires, and entire families emerged, each in their Sunday best, prepared for destinations elsewhere. Each of us collected there that morning, young and old alike, had a vision of the North as some sort of paradise, so we were dressed accordingly. Yet all the people, even whites, held a sense of regret on their faces, as if this quest for a new life signified a failure in or desertion of their old. Handkerchiefs wiped foreheads and were held in front of mouths as suitcases were carried inside. People squinted towards the sun for a heavenly answer as to why they were being roasted on what might be their last day in South Carolina. Young men smoked cigarettes. Old white men patrolled the entrance, looking for sharecroppers to stop and harass, but once my eyes met theirs they let me pass freely enough; I was less important to them than even I imagined. Tap dancers, some younger than my lost child, shuffled for change or ceremony.

  Romanesque pillars stood in the front of the main, whites-only entrance—freshly painted, with flecks of dirt caught in the ridges carved to look classical and permanent. The colored entrance was along the side of the station, closer to the actual tracks, where the paint chipped and exposed the pine flesh beneath.

  There was a single common platform, dense with sweat and anticipation. I tucked my suitcase under my arm and presented my ticket to the porter—a stout, dark man who lived in one of the adjoining cities, and whose cousin once owned the local pharmacy. We didn’t acknowledge each other, though, as if already I was distant and transformed into someone new, someone he didn’t recognize.

  As crowded as the bench was, I was able to squeeze onto the edge and, like the rest of the occupants, turn my head expectantly toward the direction in which the train would arrive. Although I held no admiration for the machines themselves, what I’ve always liked about train tracks is the way they converge on the horizon and give the impression that someday, inevitably, pleasantly, the future will come to a fixed point, a sharp metallic conclusion. They give the illusion that whatever is lost can easily be replaced by distance.

  In less than an hour that horizon was broken by a tall, thin cloud of smoke. Children in tall, thin socks and patent-leather shoes, polished enough to show perfect reflections of the families around them, raced to the edge of the platform for a closer look. As the lone black dot neared, adults began gathering their belongings. Rather than a grinding, we heard a squeaking of metal and a crunching of sand. Rather than anticipation, there was a feeling of resolve. When I looked towards the front of the station platform I saw a young white woman—she didn’t appear older than seventeen—sitting still on a cast iron bench amongst the commotion. Even though she was visibly pregnant, no one helped her, and when another porter tried, she igno
red him and instead squinted forward, away from the train, into nothingness, waiting. I turned my glance downward.

  By the time the Dawn Lightning rolled into the station I’d mopped the sweat from my neck, brow, and palms, and had counted the splintering planks on the platform floor at least a dozen times. I counted the nails which attached them at least a dozen more. Atop the plank closest to me, a maelstrom of ants circled something invisible. People rose and stood in line to board; I stayed on the bench a moment longer, watching pigtails bounce above the bright-wide eyes of small children excited for their longtime dream of a train ride to come true. Their mothers and fathers followed in thick shawls worn over summer dresses and suit coats over frayed suspenders or coveralls: moth-eaten, too heavy for the hot weather, but the easiest way to transport what one owned. When I looked for the young pregnant woman, she was gone; only then did I board the train myself.

  Perhaps I should have waited a little longer. When I entered my appointed car the aisles were still crowded with travelers waiting for others to make a decision. Baggage was stacked to the sides and around us, as if taking priority over the passengers. I searched for familiar faces, not expecting or finding any, and then took the nearest available seat—on the aisle, facing the rest of the car and the back of the train, so that I could only see where I’d been, which was fine since I didn’t really care where I was headed—and placed my suitcase in my lap. I imagined others were watching me, but they weren’t. Somewhere a baby cried and was silenced. Across the Pullman coach, in a window seat, sat a small boy, hair cut close to the scalp, with a suitcase in his lap and a crinkled newspaper opened to the comics section. He didn’t acknowledge anyone at all, only stared out the window as if longing for home. The station filled the windows closest to me; beyond the windows across the aisle was an open field with hills I’d memorized too early in life to find them impressive now. This container was my world for now, and beyond its walls there was a well I wanted to forget. I sank into the thin upholstery as much as I could, breathing the stifling air as slowly as possible, savoring my share. I wanted to ease into sleep and dream another life until I arrived at a location where I could actually build one.