by Gina nahai
They ate potatoes and corn bread fried in lard. Rose showed them her box of cottonmouth moccasins, her bottles of Red
Devil’s lye. She spoke of washing her children in the Blood of the Lamb and immersing them in the Word, told Adam she was certain her sons had died knowing the Lord. The tarpaper that had once served as a roof had come undone in places and was letting in a cold March wind. Every night Adam wrapped his arms around his mother’s neck and fell asleep by the coal fire.
He awoke every morning terrified that Clare had left him. She would be gone all day looking for a job, or just escaping her mother’s rules and prayers. Often she came home with whiskey on her breath and makeup smudged all over her face.
“That girl is going to have herself killed any day now,” Rose told Adam every night before Clare returned from her day’s adventures. They knelt together on the ground and prayed for Clare’s soul, went to the neighbor’s and prayed some more.
“I’ve been seeing visions of my dead husband,” Rose told Adam, “and I saw a crow flying through the train car. These are omens of death, so I know something’s going to happen to your mother unless she finds the Lord.”
One Sunday they went to a Holy Rollers’ meeting where Rose drank an entire glass of strychnine diluted with water. The weather had begun to thaw and the melting snow on the mountains had made the water rise in the creek, and so it took longer than usual to get home but even then Clare was nowhere to be seen.
Rose dreamed she was walking through a room with white drapes hanging from the walls and windows.
“That’s the second sign of pending death,” she told Adam.
He knelt by his bed that night and prayed to God that He return his mother to him alive.
“I’m seeing visions,” he heard Rose speak in the dark. “I’m being warned of your mother’s death, and I can’t do anything to stop it.”
Two days later, when Clare did come home she had bruises all over her face and arms, a broken tooth, blood inside her mouth.
“The same man who’s been beating you is going to kill you,” Rose warned.
All week long she saw dead people walking around the train car. On Monday morning, they took her away.
Adam found her sitting with her eyes open and her hands folded on her lap, and for a moment, he didn’t realize that anything was wrong except that she had a weird look in her eye—a stunned expression, he thought, as if she had seen something at once pleasant and bewildering. Then he noticed that she had not moved for a long time, and he went closer and touched her hands that were ice-cold and he understood what had happened.
It had never occurred to Rose that the death she was being forewarned about might be her own.
Clare was gone again, so Adam ran to the neighbors’ house and called for help. The husband came over and picked Rose up in his arms, carried her into his own home where he helped his wife lay out the corpse. Taking the entry door off its hinges, they laid each end on the back of a chair, and put the body over it to wash. By then Rose’s limbs had hardened a bit, and the neighbor’s wife had to use hot water to help stretch out her legs. They tied the body down to the board to keep it from jerking, folded Rose’s arms across her chest, and kept her mouth closed by wrapping a handkerchief around her head. Instead of copper pennies, which might be stolen, they placed stones over her eyelids.
All day long they prayed over the corpse and waited for Clare to come back. They sent Adam to look for her in nearby homes and stores, asked him if she had said where she was going, if she had mentioned whom she intended to visit, how long she normally stayed away. By evening the body was getting discolored and emitting sucking sounds—a result of gastric juices. Cats roamed the house waiting to eat the corpse’s eyes to steal its soul, and the neighbors began worrying that bugs would attack Rose’s corpse and that the smell of death would set in because of the warm weather. By the next morning, when Clare was still missing, they told Adam it was up to them to bury Rose.
They sent him home to find the black shroud that Rose had woven for herself years earlier, and which she had hung out to air every spring so moths wouldn’t eat it. Back in their house again, he helped the husband nail together some boards and create a box. They wrapped Rose’s body in the shroud and placed it in the box, dug a grave directly outside the train car, and planted a hand-made cross in the earth.
They waited for Clare.
She had been gone twenty-four hours when Rose died, forty-eight when she was buried, and after that the sun kept rising and setting and the days kept rolling away, but there was no sign of Clare and no word of her whereabouts. Adam looked for her alone and with the help of the neighbor’s wife, sat up waiting for her until his eyes burned with exhaustion and his hands went numb. He kept looking at the clothes she had left on the ground outside the train car, telling himself she would come back for the clothes, if not for him, that she would not leave him again, would never leave him after she had returned from the North to take him from the orphanage. The neighbors looked at him sideways and talked about him in whispers and smiled when he told them his mother would not be long now, not long at all, she must have been held up at a job and would soon come back for him. They gave him food and took him along to church on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, and when they became tired of feeding him they put him in a car and drove him up Highway 63 to the orphanage.
They let him out of the car on the side of the road and said it was up to him to go in and beg Mr. Harris for a place to live, or to walk away.
He di dn’t walk.
He wanted to, but didn’t have the nerve.
As much as he hated the orphanage, it had given him the only stable home he had ever known, the only real bed he had ever slept in. Nine years old and already twice abandoned by his mother, having recently buried his grandmother, Adam could not conceive of a life without any attachments at all, but he could not imagine going back to the home either, could not bear the thought of what Harris would do to him knowing that Clare had left him again and that Adam had come back willingly.
So he stood on the side of the road and prayed that he would vanish into the dirt without a trace, watched dusk set in and fought the tears that welled up in his eyes and forced their way onto his cheeks. Without daring to turn around and look, he felt that Harris was watching him from his office window, that he was waiting, because he knew Adam would give in to his fear and stumble back to him. Darkness fell and the stars came out and Adam was still standing there. Cars drove by and slowed down to look at him, then sped away. Truckers, who routinely drove past the home, knew better than to stop.
Keep walking, he told himself, but his legs would not obey and his hands were frozen into fists, and then he heard the sound of the final bell ringing in the home and realized that if he did not go in right away, he would have to spend the night outside. He dashed up the dirt road and through the fence.
Mr. Harris looked at him in the doorway. His very proximity frightened Adam. The man’s body, though perfectly still, seemed charged, as if about to attack, as if certain it had its prey. He had known Adam would come back, he seemed to say without speaking. Some children didn’t, but Adam was different, and now he was here and it was up to Harris to give him shelter or deny it.
He NEVER DID forgive himself for going back, never did recover from the anger he felt for not having had the courage to keep walking. That’s why he would keep moving as an adult, why, he imagined, his mother had kept running all her life: to cover the distance between the place she had been left by God or destiny, and that other place—the one she knew existed without having seen it, where she knew she was meant to, that she deserved to, be. It wasn’t about accepting one’s place in this world and longing for a better one in the next. It was about setting right what had been wrong in the first place—even if that meant having no home, no life, at all.
Ironically, it was the orphanage that, in the long run, gave him the means to walk.
It took twelve years of his lif
e, but it gave him an education as good as any available in the state, enough food and shelter to keep his body growing into adulthood, the skills to make a living once he was out on his own. He went to class in the morning and worked the fields in the afternoon. He plowed the earth and planted it, filled silos in the summer, fed cows in the winter. He learned to drive a truck and a tractor, to kill hogs. Mostly, he learned to work tobacco.
In his mind tobacco would forever be linked with the possibility of relief—colors that were soothing to the eye, fields that were long and wide and isolated, a loneliness that gave him time to grieve—out there away from Harris and his whip; away, too, from the other boys at the home, boys whose very existence reminded Adam of his own loneliness.
Every tobacco crop required thirteen months of work, and near-constant care. In December Adam and a group of boys were sent out to pick a site near the river, clear it of trees and brush and debris, and light a fire to disinfect the soil. After that they tilled the burnt soil, sowed it with tiny tobacco seeds, and stretched a cloth over the land to protect the sprouts from frost damage. They planted burley tobacco for cigars, dark-fired tobacco for cigarettes.
Through the winter Adam watched the blackened earth and tended the seedlings that emerged from the ground and would grow taller in the spring. In the summer, when the shoots were around eight inches tall, he pulled them from the bed, plowed the field, and reset the shoots in the patch. As the plants grew in their new beds, he watched for weeds, pulled the suckers that popped out on the stalk above each leaf, snapped the top off each plant when the tobacco flowered. All along he watched for worms: they were plump, three inches long, the same color green as the leaves they fed on. He had to search for them on each leaf, pick them off by hand, and crush them.
At harvest time he split the tobacco stem from the top down with a curve-blade knife, then cut it just above the ground. He let the plants wilt in the sun, then hauled them into the barn to hang on six-foot-long sticks. Burley tobacco leaves turned from green to light tan as they air-dried, but the dark-fired tobacco was heavier and needed heat to dry.
Inside the barn he lit a bonfire on the floor to dry the leaves. The heat made the worms that had escaped his scrutiny fall from the plants like rain. Through November he guarded the tobacco as it hung in the barn. In December he stripped the leaves from the stalks, sorted them into piles according to the darkness of their shade, and sent them off in trucks or took them on a train to places where they would be auctioned. Then it was time to find a new patch of land and prepare the earth for another crop.
He worked tobacco every year he was in the orphanage, and after a while he realized that Harris counted on him for this, that he needed someone who was hardworking and smart and able to concentrate on a job long enough to see it through. He realized, too, that Harris resented Adam’s progress at school, that he became angry and found a reason to punish Adam every time one of the widows mentioned how well Adam could read, or how quick he was at grasping new ideas. By age twelve Adam had exhausted the widows’ knowledge and was helping them teach boys younger than himself. One of the teachers, Mrs. Kelsey with the enormous breasts and the husband who had died in the war, took it upon herself to suggest that Adam should be allowed to attend the local high school. She was a fleshy young creature with bright eyes and a delightful smile, childless because she had been married only a week when her husband had left for the war, unable to remarry because the preacher in her church said that marrying more than once, even with a dead husband, was like being “double-married,” which the Bible said was a sin.
Mrs. Kelsey liked Adam’s quick wit, and she was naive enough to think that Mr. Harris might be proud to hear of the boy’s talents, so she suggested that Harris let Adam attend the public school outside the home.
“He can continue to learn.” She beamed before Harris, unaware of the damage she was causing. “And he can serve as an example for the other boys.”
Mr. Harris told Mrs. Kelsey that women were well-advised to keep their mouths shut, for fear of exposing their stupidity. Then he sent for Adam.
INSIDE the OFFICE, Harris had laid his whip down at the edge of the desk, and was pacing the room with his hands clasped behind his back. He had left the blinds open to invite anyone brave enough to look in—something he did only when he intended to administer a beating.
Adam stood at attention and kept his eyes on the ground. He listened to Harris pace the floor, saw the tips of his shoes that were polished military-style, the edge of his anklebone pushing out against his frayed dark socks, the starched-and-pressed cuffs of his khaki-green pants. It was these moments—the silence before Harris began to speak, the calm before he started a beating—that were most frightening, most painful, to the children. But Adam was not afraid.
For a while now, whenever he found himself alone with Harris, he had felt a rage he had to fight hard to contain. He would suffer the beatings and the demeaning remarks, the hunger and isolation Harris imposed on him for every infraction, but instead of feeling defeated as he had done in the past, Adam increasingly became emboldened by his anger: he found himself engaging Harris’ glare, refusing to answer his questions or feeling pain at his beatings. He imagined attacking Harris back, dreamt of killing him with a sharp knife the way his grandfather had killed the mine boss in Kentucky—and it was the lack of emotions, the complete absence of fear or remorse at what he would do to Harris, that satisfied Adam most.
“Mrs. Kelsey has asked if I might give you permission to go to the city school,” Harris said in a cool voice.
Adam raised his eyes from the floor and stared at him.
He crossed the length of the room once, and then back.
His heels squeaked against the bare floor. He stopped in front of his desk, turned to face Adam, waited for an answer.
“She tells me this is her own idea,” he said when Adam did not respond.
Adam was looking at him with glass eyes.
“She tells me she thinks it’s in your interest.”
If Harris hit him, Adam decided, he would hit back.
Harris must have felt this—Adam’s anger—or at the very least he must have felt unsafe because he started to pace again, putting the desk between himself and the boy. The distance he put between them made Adam feel relieved. Then suddenly he grabbed the whip off the desk and struck Adam across the face.
Adam heard the sound of leather tearing his skin. He felt the whip sink into his muscles till it had found the bone. For an instant, the whip remained embedded in his face. Blood gushed out around it and blinded him in the eye. When Harris pulled back his arm, the whip took away a bloody strip of flesh and left a gash half-an-inch wide in Adam’s face.
It ran from the corner of his right eye, down over the side of his mouth onto his chin. Adam felt the burn but not the pain. Blood spilled off the front of the whip and onto the floor and the desk. It poured down Adam’s face, onto his shirt and his hands, then his feet. Harris was looking at him triumphantly.
“This is for thinking you can go around me to get what you want,” he hissed.
Adam was looking at the whip on the desk.
He did not move or make a sound, did not raise his hand to touch the place where the whip had landed.
Harris sat in his chair, put the tips of his fingers against the edge of the desk, leaned back till the front legs of the chair had come off the ground.
“You can go now,” he said, but his voice wavered in midsentence and his eyes grew wide and he saw Adam rushing him from across the room, climbing onto his desk like an animal in the wild, and landing on his chest with all the weight of his twelve-year-old body.
The chair gave out. Harris fell on his back—Adam’s knees digging into his ribs—and before he could fight back Adam had grabbed his temples in his hands, raised his head, slammed it on the floor, raised it and slammed it again. He would have killed Harris—would have killed him with a few more strikes except that the door burst open and some of the boys w
ho had- been watching through the opening in the blinds rushed in and pulled Adam off.
Harris spent two days in a city hospital recovering from the attack. He came home with a bruised face, swollen eyes, three broken ribs. He gave Adam a beating in the mess hall before all the children and their teachers, ten days in the boiler room around the clock, only one meal a day for thirty days. Then, inexplicably, he gave him permission to attend the city school.
Maybe, Adam would reason later, Harris had come to fear the boy as much as Adam had once feared him. Maybe the old army man in him respected a show of force and responded better to the twelve-year-old’s violence than he had to the five-year-old’s tears.
Maybe, too, Mr. Harris really did believe that salvation came through learning, that educating the orphans was the only way to give them a chance. That’s what haunted Adam in all the years after he had left the home and escaped Harris: that the very man who had poisoned his childhood with his vengeance had also given him the only chance he could have at life beyond the mountains.
THIS is WHAT he learned early in life, what he was convinced had saved him throughout: that the longing for safety was man’s greatest weakness, the need to connect his biggest downfall.
He had learned this from Clare’s attempts to be recognized by Jenkins, from the nights, too, he had spent waiting for his mother to come home. He had learned it from Rose who had put her faith neither in men nor in earthly things and who, therefore, could not be betrayed by them, learned it from his own experience fighting Harris at the school: the true victors, the ones who prevailed most often, went into the fight feeling they had nothing to lose.