Trouble Don't Last

by Shelley Pearsall

  “Mas Hackler.”

  He kept going on and on, pointing to his arms, and his legs, and his back, and his feet, and then my feet, and my arms, and my legs—making me say Master Hackler's name each time—until I wished I hadn't even breathed a word in the first place.

  And then Harrison said, “Now, if my hands don't belong to me and they take something that don't belong to me neither, is that stealin?”

  “I s'pose not,” I said uneasily, because Harrison wasn't making one bit of sense.

  “All right, then.” Harrison leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “That's why what I done wasn't wrong.”

  I thought for a while. Then I asked real low and quiet, “So you sayin it ain't wrong if I take more things to eat and drink from the cellar, ‘cause my hands don't belong to me?”

  Harrison's eyes flashed open and he snapped, “Was you listenin atall, Samuel? This cellar don't BELONG to us, and our hands don't BELONG to Mas'er Hackler no more, so if we take something from this cellar, THAT would be stealin.” He unfolded another one of the blankets, and tucked it around him. “Lordy, you is thick as a turnip sometimes.”

  I was getting more and more angry. Harrison was talking nonsense about what was stealing and what wasn't, and what belonged to us and what didn't, and I was hungry, hungrier than all the times Master Hackler or Miz Catherine had taken away my supper meals, and a whole cellar full of good food was sitting around us—

  My eyes fell on the roll of gray yarn setting beside the empty basket.

  “This yarn belong to me?” I said, holding up the gray yarn and waving it in front of Harrison. “You said it did before.”

  “Yes.” Harrison looked down at his hands.

  “Then I'm gonna give away my gray yarn for takin some more food. Say I leave the yarn right here—” I stood up and set it carefully on the top of one of the barrels. “So whoever comes down in the cellar can find it. And then taking more food for my ownself ain't wrong.”

  Harrison sighed. “You can't give away that gray yarn, Samuel.”

  “I'm hungry.” I stared hard at Harrison. My breath went in and out, in fast and angry puffs. “I don't want no worthless ol' piece of yarn.”

  “It ain't worthless,” Harrison said softly.

  “Looks worthless to me.” I picked up the yarn and pulled at the tangles.

  “Well, you doesn't know everything, does you?” Harrison answered sharply. He laid down, smacked a place for his head in the straw tick, and turned his face to the wall.

  “Yes, I does.”

  Harrison was silent.

  “Yes, I does,” I said louder.

  “Then you sho’ must know where that gray yarn come from.” Harrison's voice was muffled by the blankets.

  “Where?” My voice was sharp and angry. “Where'd it come from?”

  Harrison's head turned to look at me.

  “Your own momma,” he snapped.

  I stared at Harrison. It seemed like the threads grew warm in my hand after he said that. Almost as if my momma herself had just given the yarn to me right there.

  Used to be, I would ask Lilly if my momma had used this rolling pin or that flatiron, just to set my hands on something that she had touched, since there was nothing left for remembering her. But, in all the time they had raised me, Lilly and Harrison had never said one word about having gray yarn that once belonged to my momma. They had never told me about anything she had left behind when she was sold off—

  “Stop thinkin up a hundred and one questions to be asking,” Harrison said sharply. “I ain't talkin no more about it.” He smacked the straw tick with his hand. “Now, you lay down here and git some sleep, or I'm gonna hand you over to them dogs my ownself. I'm powerful tired of you.”

  Heaving a loud sigh, I lay down on the smallest edge of the straw tick, as far away as I could get from old Harrison. I put the yarn right in front of me where I could see it. Maybe I figured that looking at it would remind me of something about my momma. Squinting my eyes, I tried to see her hands spinning the wool. Did she have thin, skinny-bone fingers like mine? Was she gonna use the yarn for making something? Maybe something for me?

  Then a terrible thought went through my mind.

  Did they take her right in the middle of her work? Was she spinning the same yarn Harrison had given to me?

  My mouth turned dry as dust, thinking about it.

  “Harrison,” I turned my head and whispered real quiet. “Harrison, you there?”

  But Harrison was breathing slow and even like he was in a deep sleep. If I woke him, I knew he would be in a fit worse than one of Miz Catherine's. So I set my head back down, closed my eyes, and tried to think of something else besides my momma spinning that yarn.

  And I must have fallen asleep after that because the next thing I knew, Harrison was shaking me awake and quick footsteps were coming down the steps and across the cellar floor.

  Widow Taylor

  The footsteps stopped on the other side of the wall of barrels, and a white woman's voice spoke up, fast and breathless.

  “I'm Mrs. Lucy Taylor,” the voice said. “And I have my husband's rifle with me and I know how to use it because he taught me and I'm not afraid to shoot anything, even colored people, so …” The voice slowed and paused, as if thinking what to say. “So …” There was a long silence. “So you best not cause me any kind of trouble,” the voice finished quickly.

  Beside me, Harrison sat up fast.

  His hands plucked at his coat, the blankets, and the basket, looking for something. “We got money to pay you, Miz Taylor,” he called out. “That fellow in the boat give us money to pay you. Lord, have mercy, don't shoot us. Me and Samuel, we'll go and give you all the money we got.”

  Shaking the leather pouch, Harrison poured the coins into his trembling hand. One rolled silently into the blankets. “Go on, git that coin, Samuel,” he whispered.

  “How many coloreds are hiding behind the barrels? I hear two of you. Are there more?”

  “That's all. Just an old man and a boy,” Harrison said.

  “Come out from behind the barrels so I can see you.”

  My heart hammered in my ears as me and Harrison moved out from where we were hiding like two caught mice.

  On the other side stood the woman who called herself Lucy Taylor. She was smaller than her voice sounded, and dressed head to toe in black. Black bonnet. Black dress. Black shoes. An old hunting rifle rested against the silk folds of her dress, and her face was shadowed in the deep black bonnet.

  The widow lady, I thought. That's who this is.

  But glancing quick at her hands, I noticed a strange thing. The white hands wrapped around the rifle weren't the wrinkled and thin-skinned hands of an old widow lady. They were smooth and young.

  “You don't need to come any closer,” the woman said. “Just stand there.”

  Me and Harrison stopped in our footsteps, not saying a word.

  “Did you come a long way?” the woman asked after an uncomfortable-long silence. She stared at us, holding that gunmetal tight.

  “Aways,” Harrison answered, keeping his eyes down. “Yes'm.”

  “Is the boy someone's slave too?”

  Harrison's hand tightened on my arm. “Yes'm.”

  I could hear the woman's dress rustling as she stepped closer and peered at me from her black bonnet. She had a round, pale face, and the way it looked inside her bonnet made me think of a spring bulb set inside the earth. “My family in Kentucky kept slaves. A colored woman looked after me, growing up. Her name was Letty.” She turned to Harrison. “Did you ever know a colored woman named Letty?”

  “No'm.” Harrison cleared his throat. “But we got money here to pay you, if you just let us go on now. We ain't gonna cause you no more trouble.” He held out his handful of silver coins. “Just let me and Samuel move on to another place.”

  The woman was silent, not even looking at the coins. Then she said real quiet and sudden, “My husband, Jacob, is d
ead.”

  Harrison looked down. “Purely sorry to hear that.”

  “He came down with a fever in August after that spell of hot weather we had,” the woman said in a tight-strung voice. “The doctor in town tried all of his fancy remedies. Jacob is as strong as a horse, he told me. But I came into Jacob's bedchamber one morning, and he opened his eyes and told me that he was going away. By that evening he was dead.”

  “Purely sorry to hear that,” Harrison said again.

  There was more silence, and then the woman said softly, “I have seen him, though.” Eyes wide, she looked at Harrison. “Do colored people believe in seeing those who are gone?”

  A shiver went through me, but Harrison cleared his throat and said slowly, “Well, now, I s'pose, yes'm, I s'pose they does.”

  The Widow Taylor ducked her bonnet down. “I see Jacob in the kitchen sometimes,” she said quietly. “He sits at the table, looking the same as he did in life, and he tells me how to do things when I am close to tears …how to figure the farm accounts and how to pull corn for fodder and how to prime the pump for his well. He says—”

  The woman's voice trembled and stopped, and she reached for something behind her. “Well, now, it's almost evening. Here, I brought you some supper,” she said in a hurry. “You have been sleeping in the cellar all day without any food to eat.”

  She set a basket of food on the floor in front of her. “I put in a ham bone left from yesterday's stew, and six corn cakes, and a handful of snap beans,” she said, tapping the basket with her foot. “Tomorrow evening, what I will do is drive Jacob's wagon around to the cellar door and take you to Reverend Pry's church when I go for my ladies’ prayer meeting. Reverend Pry's church is where Jacob always took the coloreds next.”

  She stared at me and Harrison with a scared kind of look in her eyes again. “You won't give me any difficulties this evening or tomorrow, will you? You won't take any of Jacob's things from the cellar and run off, will you?”

  Harrison held out the coins again. “Me and Samuel got plenty of money to pay you for all that food, Miz Taylor.”

  “Yes, well…” Her voice trembled. “I suppose …”

  I watched as the widow lady opened a black-edged handkerchief and set it carefully on the clay floor between us. “Put five of your coins there,” she said, keeping her eyes on us.

  Harrison reached down and dropped five silver coins into the middle of the handkerchief.

  “You can step away now,” the lady said, and after we moved far enough back, she bent over and lifted each lace corner of the handkerchief real careful-like, so that her white fingers didn't touch the same coins that our black hands had touched. Miz Catherine was always that way, too. Made me feel like my skin was no different than fireplace soot.

  Miz Taylor tucked the handkerchief in her dress and picked up the hunting rifle. “I didn't want to keep on hiding colored people in the cellar,” she said, turning to leave. “But Jacob told me to carry his rifle and to keep doing the things just the same as he would do. You'll tell me if you see him down here, won't you?”

  Then, in a swirl of black silk, she ran up the steps and shut the cellar doors behind her, leaving me and Harrison in the pitch darkness.

  “Lord, have mercy,” Harrison said loudly. “You still standin next to me, Samuel?” He reached out and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

  Squinting into the shadows, I said, “You don't think her dead husband is up and walking round here, do you? Like she said he was?”

  “Lordy I sure do hope not. Last thing I need to worry about is dead whitefolks too.” Harrison shuffled forward. “Now, where'd she go and leave that good basket of food?”

  Sitting down on the straw tick, we divided up the food she had brought. Harrison left most of the ham bone and four corn cakes for me, and took just two little corn cakes and a few snap beans for himself.

  “Ain't that hungry,” he said, but I figured he was remembering how I had been begging and scraping for some more food that morning.

  While we were eating those corn cakes, I started thinking about the gray yarn again, and I tried asking about it, thinking maybe Harrison would tell me something more. “This gray yarn come from my momma?” I said, picking up the tangle of wool.

  “Yes.” Harrison nodded his head and chewed slow and silent. “And you already heard all you needs to know, Samuel.”

  But I kept on.

  “Was my momma spinning this yarn when Mas Hackler took her away?”

  Harrison fixed me with a stare.

  “That why you kept it? ‘Cause of that?”

  Harrison heaved a loud, angry sigh. “Samuel, you try my soul worse than the Devil himself. I ain't tellin you anything else, you hear?” His voice rose. “I got good enough reasons for keeping some things secret, and if you keep on askin me foolish things, I swear I will just up and leave, you hear?”

  He snapped his handful of beans hard.

  Snap, snap, snap.

  I put the yarn in my pocket and kept quiet. “Don't you feel sorry for that white lady, being left alone like that?” I asked. “I feel sorry for her missing her husband so much. She ain't very old.”

  “Well,” Harrison said, still sounding mad, “I don't.”

  “Why?” I picked at the ham bone.

  “ ‘Cause corn and crows don't grow in the same field.”

  “What?”

  “Whitefolks and blackfolks ain't got the same feelings. They ain't the same people as us. I don't know how whitefolks feel, and they sure don't know one sorry thing about me. Corn and crows, they don't grow in the same field.”

  “You sayin you ain't sad when someone up and dies?”

  I thought about Lilly going to visit her children in the Negro burying-ground and talking to each one of them. “Now, Viney” she'd say to the one. “Don't you go tearing ‘round heaven all the time, like you used to when you was down here with us …

  “If they's white, I got one feeling. If they's black, I got another,” Harrison said.

  I stared at Harrison, my mouth open.

  “You sayin you feel HAPPY when whitefolks die?”

  Harrison smacked my arm. “Course not. You want me to go straight to hell right now, Samuel? Lord Almighty, what makes you talk like that?” He brushed cornbread crumbs off his shirt. “I'm just sayin that I got enough things of my own to feel sorry about, and a white lady and her dead husband who I never met before ain't something I feel sorry about. If I died right here, you think she'd feel pity for my ol’ black skin? You figure she'd raise one finger to help you?”

  I thought about how she had picked up the coins in the handkerchief, corner by corner. “I don't know,” I told Harrison. “Maybe.”

  “No maybe ‘bout it,” Harrison snorted. “You a fool if you think so.”

  But later that night, after Harrison had fallen asleep, I heard the white lady crying to herself, and I am ashamed to say that I felt downright sorry for her. The sound came from a room above the cellar, maybe a bedchamber, and the terrible-sad wailing almost set me crying too. I heard the lady calling out the name Jacob Taylor, over and over, and talking to no one about the farm and the doctor and the church, and I felt sorry enough to have gone up the steps myself and fetched a cold rag for her poor lost senses.

  I thought that this side of the River Jordan would be better than the side we had come from. From what Harrison had told me, I figured that all of the blackfolks over here would be free, and all of the mean whitefolks and dogs would be gone, left behind. But this side of the river was full of its own kind of trouble, seemed like.

  I pictured the ghost of Jacob Taylor floating around, and a shiver went clear through me. Was he keeping his eye on me and Harrison? Was he making sure we didn't run off?

  Something tumbled over in the cellar. Maybe it was a mouse skittering around, but I couldn't wait for another day to come, so that we could climb into the wagon and leave the Widow Taylor's sad house behind.

  Beneath Hay and Feed Sacks


  The next evening, the Widow Taylor came around to the cellar door. We heard the creaking of the wagon wheels, and her voice talking to the horse. “Now, Jupe, you listen to me. Move up, Jupe. You are not going over there. You stop right here. Whoa, Jupe.” The horse snorted loudly outside. “Don't toss your head at me, old fellow,” she scolded. “Because I won't stand for it.”

  The cellar door opened. “Come out of there now,” the Widow Taylor called to us sharply. “I'm here with the wagon.”

  Me and Harrison were already waiting for her. I had spent the whole day going up and down the steps every little while to see if sunlight was still shining through the cracks around the cellar door.

  “Ain't it dark yet?” Harrison kept asking. “Where you think that white lady is?”

  His rigor mortis had set in again, so most of the afternoon, he had stayed piled up in the coverlets, and twice he had me poke around the cellar, looking for an old ax to put under the straw tick so he could keep the chills away.

  But finally, the Widow Taylor had come with the wagon.

  Me and Harrison left that cellar fast. After two days in the darkness, we hurried up the steps and stood outside, trying to get our eyes used to seeing in the light. The sun was setting just below the far trees, and the air smelled of wood smoke and warm earth. I breathed in a whole lungful of that good air, as if I had never taken a living breath before.

  “Over here,” the Widow Taylor said impatiently. She stood at the front of an old-looking brown horse, with her fingers curled around his bridle. His head swung up and down, blowing a snort of air.

  “You be still, Jupe.” She gave him a soft slap on the neck. “He doesn't like coloreds much, you can tell,” she said.

  But in my mind I thought maybe, truth was, he didn't like the Widow Taylor much, because she was the one holding tight to his bridle, not us.

  “Climb in,” she said, pointing at the wagon. “Jacob always puts the coloreds in the back underneath the hay and feed sacks. Just be careful of his good things.”

  I don't know what the lady meant about Jacob's good things. The wagon was a mess of tools, barrels, cordwood, and clumps of dirty hay, just like the cellar. There was nothing fancy or nice at all.