Miss Lula remained outside during his recovery, never necessarily walking amongst the workers, just checking with Floyd to ensure things were run properly and that the boy was there. According to Floyd, she did not bother Fletcher anymore after her initial harassment, leaving him to toil and sweat and ache and slog out amongst the cotton for days and months and years, as that image alone brought more joy to her mind than actually having to look into the boy’s face and see the eyes of Mr. Kern. Elizabeth also shared these eyes, that familiarity glaring back, a familiarity of things she’d lost when Elizabeth accepted the grave.
Other than that first day inside the stables, I hadn’t seen Fletcher following his return. With Silva obliged to do nothing while Mr. Kern died, I spent most days in that upstairs quarters where he lay, nostalgia growing, as a spark does to a roaring flame, as I recalled the time with the Missus nearly two years prior when her illness took hold and we formed such closeness. Although he rarely spoke or even noticed my presence, Mr. Kern drew gentler during those passing days. Whether attributable to that inevitable shrinking that occurred in the elderly that caused those once-tall giants to appear like infants or that resolution that came when so close to the end, Mr. Kern was changing and visibly so. He spoke softly in his requests for this or that. He smiled more frequently although never quite long enough to savor it for even a moment. Surprising all of us, Mr. Kern did not die as some had expected, although he never fully recovered from that illness either. His was one of those rusted hearts that lived on out of spite or repetition, merely completing the same sequences day after day with his coffee, newspapers, and walks around the grounds if he had enough strength, finding this consistency to be a vehicle that allowed him to live forever in the humdrum that existed yet never stirred too high or too low.
What started out cooler had turned insufferably hotter as that season progressed to a rapid end and compelled upon us a show of brute force, as not to be labeled inferior with summers past. Just after noonday on one of the summer’s hottest, I caught sight of Fletcher for the first time in weeks, Floyd having brought the boys around back for a spot of relief. It was there that I noticed them in conference by the side porch, dangerously close to the Missus, who sat at the front house. Jesse stood by the weak screen door with his back toward my sights while Floyd stood in front of him and Fletcher just off the main path, where only his arm was visible. From that vantage, I could assume Silva was right, as the boy’s color had indeed grown darker, although it still paled in comparison to the other workers or even that of Jesse and Floyd. And unlike those other workers, Fletcher’s color would not last past this season and would surely once again fade to display that indelible difference that existed between himself and the other workers, that difference that was always there and that stretched deeper than color. The boy was tough, and that grace he showed wrapped tightly about him as if it were a part of his own skin, yet still, one had to wonder just how long it could last inside this house.
For four years nothing seemed to happen except for the weather. The cotton grew and was picked and chopped and harvested and sold. The workers came each year, then left that plantation just as desolate and solemn as before they arrived. The land constantly changed from white to brown to green with each passing season of those cotton fields, yet it was all predictable. Each day, Floyd and Fletcher pastured the cows out by the long fence line and kept the chickens content within their coop. Jesse tossed slop at the hogs and tended the Missus’s garden, where she grew patches of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and some okra. And nothing occurred on that plantation that the Missus did not oversee or dictate or decree, at least while her strength was with her.
Jesse had married a girl from Sidon and with that union became a wiser man. He worked efficiently now, never too hard yet never leaving a task undone. He was quieter and did his hours only in anticipation of returning home to Elise. There was nothing else about him, it seemed, his wife and love for her the only things that kept him alive. Fletcher, too, was a quiet presence, much as those snapping turtles that were seen then went unnoticed for weeks at a time, the boy’s eyes always a mystery and that smile no longer visible unless he was caught in conversation with Jesse or Floyd, which was seldom. Some evenings I would see him working the far reaches of the fields, a tall figure that would stand, stretch, then bend once more as he continued. Looking beside me on the porch, Miss Lula watched him as well, her pale skin no longer taking on color as it once did. No matter the length of time she spent outdoors, her color was always the same as when I’d first met her, when it seemed as if her skin could tear by the wind’s touch alone.
Maybe it was a lack of sleep or approaching illness that pestered her, but the Missus’s eyes had grown darker. She appeared ghostly as she slipped through the house and onto the porch then retired to her quarters without a single word to anyone. Some nights she appeared to be almost maddened as I would catch sight of her wandering the hallways. I found her one night just as Silva left the main house for the evening, and the plantation sat quiet.
The kitchen was dark and everything put away as I’d ventured to Mr. Kern’s room once more before retiring to sleep. Sleep had not only touched Mr. Kern but the Missus as well, as the entire upstairs quarters sat silent and bleak beneath the shade of midnight. I eased into his room and made final arrangements for my own rest, as most evenings my bed consisted of a chair beside the Mister’s bed. Some nights when Mr. Kern proved quite capable to sleep on his own, I would find my room out in the servant quarters with Floyd just as I’d left it, a small ten by ten space with a bed and a window, that’s it. Mr. Kern’s breathing had worsened as of late and was quite labored on this evening, causing me to prepare a blanket and pillow in the chair beside him as I closed my eyes and drifted to sleep.
A noise woke me around three in the morning as I opened my eyes to see a presence in the hallway. Begrudgingly, I shrugged off that final layer of sleep, feeling my mind once again connect with muscles as I stirred in the dim space that seemed oddly recognizable, as if fully lit. The strangeness of this place was so familiar—the sadness of that lonely corridor at night when outside sat the dark peak of nocturnal bliss; the buffing of an untrafficked floor by Silva or myself, so godforsaken yet innate that it no longer provoked despair; those halls as peaceful as Eden, as they sat empty most days and never had a single smudge on them. I knew these halls well, that setting pressed upon my memory, for they had not changed in four years, although they could sometimes seem as foreign as those thoughts I’d felt when winter came to Greenwood and I dreamt of my former home in Clinton with Henry.
Drawing from the room with heavy footsteps that slid along the floor, I searched for that sight I’d seen outside the Mister’s door, my figure taking on the gloom of the hallway as I lurched. I started in the living room, a site dowsed in affirmation of Jesse’s work, as those walls still appeared as crisp as the day they were painted. From the high windows hung drapes that the young man had indeed measured, rodded, and secured to the wall. In the air was a smell of lacquer that never quite faded and still infused the room with bitter hints of its presence. With no sight of that ghostly being, I stole into the kitchen as low and measured as before. Upon the wall hung the Missus’s clock that ticked every night and could be heard throughout the house like Morse code calling some far-off place. From the corner of my sight, an ethereal presence like that of a sheet cast in blowing wind rushed past the open door. The air was cold, the wind rapping against the window’s seams and now pushing its way through the hallways as it made that narrow space as frozen as the Missus’s icebox. The light lasted as I followed its trail upstairs and watched it stop just inside the Missus’s doorway.
Fear settled upon my heart like some ironclad appendage whose weight rendered it useless. I leaned forward against the doorframe, that hardwood floor seemingly better than any cushion of my bed as I rested. Still, this fatigue did not present itself as something physical, some ailment that could be remed
ied by sleep or a good meal. No, it was altogether different although still capable of robbing me of my strength and that bit of consciousness I had at this time of night. Fearing I would sit there forever if I did not stand, I finally entered the Missus’s bedroom. She stood at the window, her nightgown blowing like a sail set free of its sheaves.
“Miss,” I called to her back, my voice lost in the wind.
Her murmurs raised and lowered yet never really reached a decibel where they were actually audible. I approached and placed my hand on her shoulder, applying loving strokes that caused her head to fall and her arms to sway limp at her side.
“Miss,” I repeated. “It’s me, Bernie.”
Her white face turned to me with plum lips that trembled.
“I see you,” she said. “Mama sees you.”
Her eyes looked into mine yet I was sure her vision was that of a dream as she continued her nonsensical speech, and the wind kept up its fuss from the open window, causing her hair to fly wildly about her head. I closed the window and led the Missus to her bedside, her body easily manipulated like that of a tired child as she had little control over her faculties and stayed wherever I placed her. She lay down to sleep with the same murmurs as before, her skin a cold mass of ice and her eyes deathly.
CHAPTER 21
This bit of madness was not an infrequent occurrence with the Missus. It had indeed worsened during those four years of isolation amongst the cotton and its endless cycle, growing stronger as Mr. Kern grew more ill and that house increasingly lonelier with only the marsh surrounding us on all sides as company. Her hysterics now manifested in a vacant stare that lasted most days for hours and incited that same trepidation I’d once had, fearing she’d fallen into one of those seizures. Yet no seizure came of these episodes, and she just remained that way for days at a time with no amount of attention capable of waking her.
And so it occurred one day as I ventured into the kitchen from an afternoon reading Mr. Kern one of his favorite books that I saw Miss Lula at the kitchen door facing outward, as stiff as a corpse standing upright.
“Bernice,” a voice called just as I moved toward the still body.
I turned to see Silva standing at the stove.
“Just leave her,” she said.
“How long has she been there?”
“Long enough,” Silva replied. “She done gone mad after all these years, and I don’t blame her. Serves her right. Crazy ass heifer. She been standing there mumbling something for the past thirty minutes. Then she started playing a game with her little imaginary friend, the only one she got.”
“Elizabeth,” I whispered.
“That child ain’t no more thinking about her than a man on the moon,” Silva said. “But if she is I’m glad, because at least she can keep the Missus out of my hair.”
“I don’t know who’s got more sense left in them,” I said. “Mr. Kern or her?”
“She ain’t never gonna be the same again,” Silva swore. “Something done placed on her heart and it won’t let her go. She goin’ see that child and what she lost and what she did for the rest of her life, God willing.”
We stood there watching the Missus for another half hour before Silva finally tired of the Missus’s presence and ushered the woman back upstairs to her quarters. Silva then returned and continued her work while I crushed Mr. Kern’s medication.
“I swear she can live like that forever and it wouldn’t bother me,” Silva said, exhaling a loud breath.
“I honestly don’t know who’ll go first,” I said.
“He’s up for the challenge,” she said. “That one’s not.”
This was the longest conversation I’d had with Silva since that dinner at her home nearly five years earlier. It was likely the longest conversation Silva had spoken with anyone inside the Kern house since Fletcher’s arrival, yet there was no need to expect she would have a desire to continue. Since my previous sighting of Fletcher outside that house with Floyd and Jesse along the back paths, I had neither seen nor heard a lick from him either, the young man somehow sensing my attention to this detail when he found me one day soon after as I worked the stables beside Roxy and Corrine. He was a solemn shade, like a tearing of artichoke leaves until one reached that center heart. He had become a creature of habit, using no other endowments other than what he had been taught for work in the fields. He was stripped of that promise he had, lowering his head as he approached and speaking like a servant would, although his tone remained that of royalty.
“Miss,” he spoke softly, “Mama sent me to help with the gathering.”
The gathering he referenced was to take place at the pecan groves on the outskirts of Mr. Kern’s land, that floodplain area where the soil was as fertile as if planted in God’s own hand. I walked him to the field where Floyd had been working since dawn, commanding this marshland that took center stage once the cotton harvest was over, where among the seventy-foot giants, workers stretched for miles as they each filled their sacks with the green husks that fell to the ground. Floyd made quick use of our labor, pointing to our designated area and issuing us each two sacks before sending us amongst the muddy trunks.
Fletcher worked close beside me, not intentionally yet the drupes were so numerous that neither he nor I could collect them all individually in one passing. He had never held much weight on him, growing taller than wider each year, and it was now safe to conclude that he would never be a stout man. Not long after we’d started, his slender frame had already buckled and could no longer support the weight of his growing sack as he sluggishly dragged it over the fractured husks and muddy ground. Although he had worked for four years now in the cotton, he was still just as weak, his skin still just as reflective of his young age and not showing of the laborious work he’d done. He was still mild-mannered and his temper never a notch above a simmer, although that kind quality often doubled as complacency. It was as I thought of him during his younger days that he turned to me with eyes that seemed to grieve for that former life and caused me to know immediately that I was surely looking at that innocent boy and no one else.
“Miss?” he now uttered as we bent amongst the groves and his forehead beaded with sweat.
“Yes, Fletcher?” I said.
“How are we not slaves?” he asked.
This shocked me more than anything he’d ever asked, although I did my best to answer.
“Because we’re not,” I replied simply.
“But how?” he insisted, returning my thoughts to that conversation he’d had with the Missus in those outer stables.
“Because no one keeps us here,” I said. “We’re not slaves to riches or fortune or any man or woman …”
“But circumstance,” he said. “We’re slaves to our circumstances.”
While it was true that at times I’d blamed the Missus for our woes and at other times the Mister, and then sometimes during my lowest, rightly or wrongly so, I’d blamed Mississippi for the way we were, I could not think of a single sufficient answer to his question for truly I’d wondered the exact same thing, if every home came with such vengeance, anger, sadness, and scorn. Maybe it was the land, I’d considered during an earlier time, as I’d looked out upon that prideful cotton bloom. That white gold was all we worked for. It was all we ever cherished, each year toiling for its perfection, and it was all we ever did. We did not seek God during those days or His love. We did not thank Him for the land He’d provided or the sky or the birds or the animals. No, we just did what our minds and our sights and our pride urged us to do, and we worshipped our sin like gods. That’s all we did.
“But, Miss Bernie, I know no one keeps me here,” Fletcher continued. “But I still feel trapped. Like I wanna go somewhere and can’t. Like I wanna do anything else sometimes but this. But is that wrong? Am I crying over something I shouldn’t?”
“No, Fletcher,” I said, lifting my sack ont
o my shoulder once more and watching him follow. “But no man’s circumstance is perfect.”
“How about yours, Miss Bernie?” he said. “You and Floyd are so different yet you’re still here in the same place.”
“Because we’re both of the same spirit,” I replied.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Here, I dropped my sack to the ground, as did Fletcher whose sack was nearly to the ground already.
“You see, Floyd had no schooling growing up, while I was taught my lesson every day,” I explained. “While he worked in the fields, I served in the house, where I had time to read and kept a book at my side. Daddy insisted I go to school for at least twelve hours a week while Floyd didn’t need any schooling because, according to Daddy, there was no reason for him to get an education when all he needed to know was out there in those fields. But we both grew up as workers, and Floyd’s knowledge gained in the cotton was no different than mine inside that house or inside those books. We both have a similar spirit that leads us to the work we do. It’s just something that’s in us.”
“Does that mean I’m supposed to work here forever too?” he asked.
“Only if you want to,” I said. “You’re only a slave to your circumstance if it’s a circumstance you don’t want or one you can’t change.”
“But there’s no way to change it,” he griped.
“There’s no way you’ve thought of yet,” I replied. “Fletcher, do birds remain in winter when that cold threatens their livelihood? Do migrants stay in one place where there is no food left to keep them?”
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