In spite of the heat and humidity, everyone at the house was in their summer Sunday finest, and once back downstairs I was given what I was told was the most comfortable chair in the house, as dinner would be served shortly. Plastic carpet runners glistened. I watched a boy in spit-shined patent leather carry a small box turtle through the house, from the front yard to the back. A little girl asked me, the closest adult, if she could have a cookie, but by the time I’d looked around to see if anyone else could confirm the request, she was gone; I picked an abandoned pink ribbon from the floor and placed it on the nearest mantle. There were no clocks anywhere, no radios, and no telephone to which Divinion could have called from the station; nonetheless, this experience was well worth the money lost. Somewhere someone mentioned: “Oh, don’t start him lying,” and I heard Divinion’s laugh; I smiled, too, even though I didn’t know where Divinion was. I wondered how I would be received if I ever returned home again.
Stories and debates folded one upon the other into music, with tips of laughter as the syncopation. I blinked as everything around me sparkled, shimmered, then glowed. Light refracted from crystal doorknobs. An old man sat next to me and asked for my story, but for the life of me, for all that I was, right then I couldn’t remember any of it.
A large ham emerged from the kitchen and dinner was served. I was invited to the head of the table but took the seat nearest to me at the moment instead. I was also asked to say grace.
“But he ain’t no minister, Mama,” Divinion said to the older woman at the head of the table. “I told you that.”
“The man can still say grace, though, can’t he?”
Before I could reply an older gentleman, who I assumed was Divinion’s father, started. Heads bowed, and once he finished delivering the blessing like a coronation, children were adjusted and handed their cutlery, then platters were passed counterclockwise.
Everything was clean, ivory, sugar, lead crystal, bone. White linen tablecloths and doilies and placemats and napkins and runners. Glasses of iced tea with lemon slices on the rim and lemon seeds at the bottom. As he ate, the old man at the head of the table had the calmest smile and the quietest eyes behind his glasses. Every bird outside sang. A light breeze caught the linen curtains every so often, bringing the songs of distant frogs with it. There were no houseflies, only a ladybug now and then, which would fly away as soon as the children noticed it and giggled. The adults laughed together as they passed Cornish hens and candied yams around the table, along with fried corn and fried okra, buttered carrots and peas, rolls and cornbread, mashed potatoes and potato salad, chicken baked or smothered, country rice with butter or salt or sugar, collards with smoked hamhocks alongside, a pot roast, oxtails in gravy. There was a calm in every sound and a silence in every movement. Everything, every morsel, cut easily. Every bite was seasoned and flavorful; nothing tasted hidden or false. It was as if this were where every incandescent pure thing in the world landed, softly. I tasted everything, asked for seconds to quiet my stomach for the rest of my journey, and thought to myself that this is what encompassing love, pure sunshine, must feel like.
After dinner I found my way to the bathroom—tile floors, exotic vials of perfumes on a small silver platter, hand towels with buttercups and wild flowers embroidered on them, a circular porcelain sink with a clawfoot porcelain bathtub behind it, a box of scrubbing powder well used, and the smell of rosewater and quicklime filling the room. I spent longer than expected washing my hands, cleaning the dirt from my shoes, washing my hands again, and staring at my reflection in the clean mirror. I nearly rubbed my knuckles raw. My face seemed unfamiliar, welcomed. I leaned in closer as if to memorize the striation in each eye. I then blinked, repositioned myself, and, once convinced I was who I thought, released the weight that seemed to hold my feet to the floor, willing them to carry me back to the hallway and the smell of pine oil on hardwood floors.
When I returned to the dining room, bowls of strawberries and sliced peaches, with slices of pound cake or coconut cake with cream frosting, were being passed, while the men in their light suits and the women in their breezy dresses settled into one chair or the next. Some of the children rested their heads in the newly available laps. I carefully closed the screen door behind me and stood on the open porch, almost as wide and deep as the house I’d left behind, watching fireflies emerge and introduce themselves to one another in the early evening. The vast green lawn, encircled by magnolia trees, had a birdbath to one side and a lone peacock strutting along the other. Behind me there was the smell of cinnamon and molasses. The air was sweet on my skin and tongue, and the fields of grass swayed deep green in one direction, pale mint in the other. I imagined swans and rabbits nearby. A dragonfly hovered near the railing, then flitted away. I inhaled and tried to hold it all in. I looked around for Divinion; in the grand waltz of everything, the other names failed me.
Still awake, unlike many of the other children, a little boy tugged at my shirt sleeve, then giggled when I turned to him and ran away. A teenage girl with caramel eyes came by and placed her hand on my shoulder before asking, “Will you be staying with us?”
I looked back at the fields and the twisted willow trees in the distance. I inhaled again, wanting to fill every cell of my lungs. “Is there an orchard somewhere?”
“In the back. You want to see it?”
I shook my head. I noticed another bottle tree, this one with a thick underbrush beneath it, speckled with wild spring flowers. Beyond that was a cypress tree, tall as a ship’s mast, split by lightning, with two rain crows in the high branches. Beyond that, the remnants of a cast iron fence. Beyond that, a single gravestone, which had tilted as the earth settled. Beyond that, the tree of knowledge. I turned to look up the gravel road Divinion and I had walked earlier. “I have someplace to be.”
“You going North?” she asked.
“There ain’t nothing happening there that can’t happen here too, good or bad,” I heard an older woman—Mama?—say, and in her voice I could tell she really believed it; in the end I couldn’t see the point in arguing.
Another young woman, lighter-skinned and presumably in her twenties, appeared. “Now, Mama, a lot is happening up North.”
“A lot is happening everywhere, all of the time. Doesn’t mean it’s anything good.”
A skinny man, lanky and in his thirties, appeared and handed Mama her glass of sweet tea, a napkin wrapped around it to absorb the condensation, then wrapped his arm around the young woman’s waist. “Doesn’t mean it’s anything bad, neither. That’s where Divinion is headed.”
“Makes no sense,” Mama declared. “You could go out west. Make something of yourself in Texas in the oil business. Wouldn’t have to go so far.”
“Texas is as bad as here, Mama,” the young man protested.
“Besides,” the young woman added, “Who would want to get their hands even blacker?”
The couple laughed; I smiled, and the young man introduced himself as Divinion’s brother-in-law, Ryland. The young woman he held was Cynthia, his wife and Divinion’s baby sister. I wanted to ask more about my travel companions but wasn’t sure how close Divinion’s ears were.
“You could go to California,” the older woman continued. “I hear it’s heavenly in California.”
“I have an uncle in California,” I lied. They waited for a moment, expecting me to add more, but that was all I could imagine, so I excused myself to look for Divinion.
I walked around the rest of the house, searching. Soon enough the train would be departing, leaving little time for us to return to the station. My heart felt light yet full. I circled the house three times, stepping over islands of children napping or happily playing with pencils and toy cars. I floated through the haze of sweet tobacco in the living room and the laughter of the women in the kitchen, their hands submerged in soapy water. I went back out on the porch, where I’d stood earlier, and made a declaration: �
��I can’t find Divinion.”
Ryland still had an arm around his wife. “Divinion left a while ago with a plate of food for Lanah.”
“What?”
“He said you’d catch up.” As he spoke, heat and panic quickly rose in me. “He said you’d keep track of time.”
Time. The train seemed like a lifetime ago.
“He said you knew.”
I managed some kind of smile, but inside I felt awkward, ridiculous, and rude, being unsure of the exact hour (there were no clocks in view). I was at least sure I had no time to say goodbye to everyone and properly thank them for their hospitality and magic. I felt shattered and foolish as I mumbled my thank-you’s to the handful of people nearby. Down in the yard, bushes trembled in the early evening breeze, and as I stepped from the porch onto the gravel walkway, distracted, I stumbled and fell. The leaf-strewn earth flew up to meet me. When I arose, it was with the imprints of pebbles deep in my palms. I quickly brushed myself off, thinking about Lanah seeing me like this.
“You okay?” Ryland asked.
“Yes, I...” I knew the direction I needed to take, but the distance eluded me. Still, I started walking. The flawless sky above the trees had grown wispy with virga.
There was a flurry of whispers, then Ryland said, “Don’t you worry, Minister, I can drive you to the platform where the Dawn Lightning is supposed to stop next. Cut right through. Not a problem at all.”
This was followed by another round of whispers.
“He’s our guest,” Ryland insisted, louder. “We have to take care of him.”
“Divinion didn’t. Just left.”
“Hush.”
“Let C.C. come and get him,” said Cynthia. I turned just in time to see her slip her hand into that of her husband as if to restrain him, or take hold for safety.
“C.C. ain’t leaving his house this time of night. You know that.”
She turned to me. “Why don’t you just stay here for the evening? I’m sure my brother-in-law will watch your things, and you can meet up with him farther along.”
“You are more than welcome to stay,” the old woman agreed. “We have everything you need here.”
I believed her. Every part of my soul wanted nothing more than that.
Ryland withdrew his hand from his wife’s. “You two are being crazy. You’re making this man think we’re country and scared of our own shadows up here. Like we ain’t got no sense.”
“Now, Ryland.”
“I’ll be all right.” He smiled at the both of them, then turned to me. “I’ll get you to that train, and I’ll be all right.”
* * *
“You’ll have to adjust the seat a little,” Ryland said as I climbed into the passenger side of his beige Plymouth holding the plate of food I’d been given for the rest of my journey. “My wife—” he stopped short as if he were thinking of her for the first time in months, as if he already missed her. The smell of easy rain and cypress was in the air again, and through the windshield I looked for new stars in the sky, but none emerged. The trees beyond, twice as old as any of us, were still darker than the sky above. There was a metallic scrape as he turned the key, and the anemic engine shuddered as the car started. “There. We’re on our way.”
Ryland eased the car onto the dirt road Divinion and I had walked earlier, where night shadows now haunted the tossing branches of the trees. I looked in the rearview mirror as we pulled away from the house, but no one was waving. It was as if they all expected to see me again soon enough—or neither of us ever again.
The world thinned as we left the grounds. The air seemed like paper, easily torn, and the moon appeared on the horizon as Ryland’s slim fingers tightened on the car’s steering wheel. Everything about the Plymouth was thin: thin tires and a thin frame that rattled as Ryland struggled to avoid puddles, pits, and craters in the road. Each one we hit sent the car on a new trajectory that Ryland had to correct. At times we would pass beneath a canopy of trees and Spanish moss only to emerge amid expanses of empty pastures with abandoned farmhouses decaying in the distance. We crossed a stream with a garbled, spectral voice that seemed to flow in a westerly direction instead of east to the ocean, though I’m not sure what its final destination could have been. The headlights were little relief in the approaching darkness, which Ryland leaned into as we sped forward. The barking of loose hounds would approach us, then fall away. Ryland didn’t look at me as I sat back in the passenger seat, watching the fields and the lacework juniper trees become shapes in the night. The darkened world seemed empty. There was static on the radio.
“We’ll make it,” Ryland finally said, as if to assure us both.
In that same middle distance, towards a ridge of small hills against the fading sun, there were the silhouettes: bodies swinging and decayed, heads with only spines connected, the shapes of all kinds of animals feeding. There was the smell I wish I didn’t know: moss and burnt flesh, mixed with the scent of the remaining life rotting. I longed for the smell of my grandmother’s quilt instead.
Ryland noticed me staring. “Don’t look over there,” he warned as he kept his eyes straight ahead. “There are ghosts over there.”
“I’ve seen ghosts before,” I lied.
“Not ghosts like those. Those ghosts follow you, climb into your soul and never leave.” He leaned forward. “Don’t catch their eyes.”
I looked instead at the road before us, dimming still under the car’s headlights. I gripped the dinner plate in my lap for greater balance. At points I expected the car to dip into quicksand, and for the both of us to safely disappear.
I’d seen a lynching before, along with the remains of one, pieces of flesh in the moist dirt, the body left ashen and charred as it dangled from the rope for all of us to see in the morning. From the shadows we watched the whole thing: the collecting pale crowd, the candy and lemonade vendors, the cousin proclaiming the man’s innocence to the deaf torches and the steadfast indifference of car headlights, the man beaten and dragged to the tree while begging for his own life as well as the lives of his wife and children, the cheers as the rope was tied and tightened, the hood, stained with dried spit and rancid sweat, placed over the man’s head, the man’s struggles as the noose went around his thin neck, the further cheers as the rope was pulled taut, the way the man ascended into the air, at first holy and angelic, the way the man’s body struggled for breath as white children played and asked their parents for popcorn and salt peanuts; the way the man’s body twitched once fully suspended; the convulsions and spasms that continued when the body was set on fire, still alive, smoke and flames rising, the smell of ashes and sweet gale, the crowd losing interest and heading home as the corpse continued to burn, the mother rushing towards the body once the crowds left, wailing to the moonlight and the night birds, her cries for us to help her take the body down—as if there was a hope for life, life after all of that.
We’d heard of Black men skinned alive and left for the possums and stray dogs. We’d heard of mixed children thrown onto cinder piles or drowned in lakes moments after their first breaths. As children, we were told of plantation owners who crucified their slaves along a makeshift Appian Way, burning the corpses afterwards. Mass graves didn’t surprise us. We believed in horror, and horrible men. Bad things happened, and in the morning we went on with our games: making handprints in the wet earth, hoping they would last through the entire afternoon or marveling at how long our fingers had grown.
I felt myself blink. I tried to move my mind elsewhere, and all of a sudden I was jolted by the memory of a cracked plate, different from the one I now held, at dinner—a small chip that I’d forgotten about until now. I wondered when the plate would be discarded without anyone thinking twice; I wondered why it was still there at all.
There was a single fat lantern in the lobby of the station, swaying as it illuminated the bare floorboards, sweeping light f
rom one side of the station to the other. To me the place looked abandoned, but Ryland assured me that the Dawn Lightning would stop there. As the car slowed he shook my hand vigorously, as if we were brothers ourselves, as if he needed some sense of family right then. I thanked him and wished him luck, but I should have said more. I wanted to tell him to come with me, that it was safer, but I didn’t know that for certain, or what our northern destination would really be like. I wanted to tell him to take me back to the house with him, that maybe two people in the car would prevent any others from approaching, that if he waited at the station until morning the danger would be gone, but the words soured on my tongue, then dissolved. I knew they weren’t true.
I got out of the car. “Take care of Divinion, now,” Ryland said, and before he pulled away he gave me the kindest smile I’ve ever seen, even to this day. I waved, and before I knew it the Plymouth had raced into the darkness of the thin trees beyond us, the red taillights like tiny shrinking eyes. Then headlights, like the great golden eyes of wolves, came alive in the darkness and veered away, following Ryland’s beige sedan, bouncing away along the narrow road that had brought us here. For a moment I hoped that those lights would turn back, maybe come after me instead; I wanted that. They didn’t. More lights joined the hunt. Eventually they all disappeared into the distance, and there were no sounds in the night, besides the wind.
The Salt Fields Page 6