by C. E. Morgan
He searches the northern slope of the hill, where sweet gum, mulberry, and beech trees congregate in clusters, until he finds a thick limestone berm, where the hill just begins its precipitous, gravelly fall to the river. The thin, level space is sheltered by the broad cordated leaves of plants so tall on their scapes, he initially mistakes them for trees. A mass of verdant foliage encases the ledge, making a cool shelter there.
He says, “This is where we gonna spend the night. I aim to wake you when it’s still dark, and then we gonna climb down and swim. Save your strength, Miss Abby.”
She nods her head and Scipio detects the sharpening of fear in her eyes as she contemplates the hillside and the rustling river far below, but when he sits under the leaves, she follows his lead meekly and is almost instantly asleep, snoring gently, though fitting and starting, her mind darting here and there just beneath sleep’s surface—he recognizes the motion, because he sleeps like that too, his spirit riven by fear. His brief dreams are like jars shattering. For twelve days, he has lived in terror. He shudders, turning his head away from Abby’s bedraggled, restless form and huddling deeper into himself, feeling not just weary but crippled in his pained exhaustion, so that if a patroller were to point the snout of a rifle into their leafy hut, Scipio would be altogether unable to run, or even rise. But they are well hidden in the foliage and though he can just spy the quick river below, the vegetation shuts out the light, forcing an early evening in their bower, over which evening slowly descends: First, a crepuscular smudge at the edges of eastern time and the sky is brushed with crimson and damask, then shadows are knit from the darkest remnants of day, the dark sprawls, daybirds mourn and nightbirds vivify, bony egrets sweep along the tributaries of the river and their flapping wings sound like brown paper crinkling, and bank swallows burrow in the dirt banks, the falling light is gay laughter in another room, the waterside plants hang sorrowful heads from slender petioles, the river speaks in low, brooding tones, the river is a coal seam exposed in a hollow, the river is black velvet unspooled from its bolt, the river is a vein opened, the river is decay, every fine line grown indistinct in the gloaming. A bird trills from the southern shore and the northern shore echoes the call, near intimates but never intimate, now a single lush billow of wind suggests rain and a muggy wet woolen is tossed over the shoulders of the land, the river valley swaths herself in wedding gauze, misty evening hums, this is a shroud or a mother’s shhhhhhhh, a droning prayer, this river is a lullaby and a dirge, this river is a promise made in daylight but upheld by night, and soon there will be no color because the night is coming on and nameless animals now call roll for the absent overseer and beneath the crenellated edge of the dew-soaked plants, Scipio’s eyes are draping shut against his will. But the crooning of a mourning dove or a mockingbird—the latter so infinitely variable, who can distinguish them—pierces the air and starts him from his momentary rest. He forces a final reconnoitering glance at the river, which holds one last fistful of scattered light, and he thinks, it ain’t so wide after all, and then he grasps the absurdity deep down in the marrow of his bones, how this very night the mask of slavery will be lifted from his face by geography, this arbitrary fact of twelve hundred feet, this quarter mile God laid down for beauty’s sake. Your humanity depends upon the ground beneath your feet. You cannot straddle this river. You must choose a side.
Later, he wakes from fitful sleep in the dark but forces himself to be still, waiting for that precise moment when the night has grown late but the morning star is yet to rise. He waits and waits, until he can’t bear it another minute, and then he wakes Abby. She comes to with a soft cry.
“We got to go now,” he says, and they slip out from under the shelter of the plants into the dark, which presses them from both sides. They are suddenly electric with wakefulness. Hand in hand, they navigate the descent to the flat plane of the river, stumbling on exposed roots and the frangible soil of the hillside, the slippery spots where exposed limestone is slick with dew and the scat of animals that passed here just hours before. Through masses of tangled vegetation, Scipio catches brief snatches of the river, and he knows it is the river only because it is blacker than any other black in the night. Just as planned, he has arrived on a moonless night so there is no light to play on the water, or to light their figures for any patrollers who might be waiting and watching.
Abby cries out suddenly and Scipio whips around to shush her, but she is doubled over, gripping her belly with fingers that appear carved from stone.
“Miss Abby!” he whispers, but she doesn’t reply, doesn’t move. “You close? You can’t cross with no baby pains!”
Still doubled, Abby grapples for his shirt and grips him firm to keep him from leaving, but he has no intention of leaving, no intention at all. He can’t run away from this woman. He has a vision of them crossing, it’s firm in his mind now like a story told to him a long time ago, a story which he now believes with all of his heart.
Abby rises up to her full height and, for once, she isn’t begging: “I telled you I’s crossing dis night. All my chilluns gived me de pain for three days fore dey come. Dis de same, and I’s swimming.”
“Miss Abby, you’re fixing to drown if you cross this river with the pains.”
She breathes through her nostrils rapidly, shoulders quaking, but fixes him with a wide-eyed stare, which is only half-wild. “Iffen I pain, den you hold me up. You hear?”
He stares at her a moment, then says, “Miss Abby…”
“You hold me and dis here poor baby up.”
“Yes.”
“Move den,” she orders, and they move down the last stretch of oak-clogged hill, which slopes to an alluvial flat pierced with branchless, leafless tree stumps like fat spears in the ground, and finally, sweaty with effort and fear, they stand at the edge of the moving water and Scipio is staring down at the great cinereous boulders scattered on the beach as if a kindly god has placed them there for a man and woman to hide alongside. Abby says, “Thank you, Lord, I’s brung to de River Jordan and I’s gone wade in de water. I’s never gone be de slave a de white man no more, only de slave a God.”
Scipio turns his head from words so distasteful to him. He whispers only, “Pray this river to carry us across.” He knows it will—look how low and still it is, waters pulsing easily with the river’s own calm, even breath. He can already feel his ball-and-chain spirit becoming no heavier than a feather. The patrollers are just a fading nightmare of childhood, the speculators too, the great house, and his life there, even the death of his dear mother. And see there, in place of that old dream, how near stands the opposite shore, night eliding distance, so a man can reach out strong swimmer’s arms and almost touch it.
He’s been wasting time gawking; he hunts hurriedly around the shadowy shoreline for driftwood and finds, instead, the moldering remains of what might have been a rowboat’s stern—he guesses from the angle of the sawn edge of the wood in his hand. Very little of it remains.
“Now swim with this in the crotch a your arm,” he says, and wedges it awkwardly into Abby’s damp armpit. Then he unties his tattered, sand-caked brogans and leaves them on the shore; he does not want to wear the shoes of slavery on the other side.
He grasps up Abby’s hand, says nothing more, and guides her stealthily from boulder to boulder, both of them slunk down low, though she can barely bend with her protruding belly. She grunts audibly as she walks.
The Ohio River is icy cold and in a moment it swallows them whole. Only their heads show and he thinks, Carry us, carry us, carry us, carry us, and then the rocky bed swoops away from under their feet, the hungry current carrying them as they plow through its eddies, both of them good, strong swimmers, though Abby slower because of her bulk. Scipio, slightly ahead, fastens his eyes on the black tree line on the far side, the river itself hastening him there, the current sweeping him closer to Ohio, closer to the dream, closer to Bucktown and a church of brethren who will help him, closer, closer now, ever closer. They
cross the midway point of the river, the only sound their own labored breathing.
“Oh,” Abby says once, somewhere behind him.
“Hush,” he whispers back, plowing on with wide, chopping strokes.
“Oh,” she moans, and then her voice is full of water. There is a brief thrashing sound, another gasp, and she slips below. She doesn’t cry out again, but her hands crash once more on the surface like the sound of two oars smacking, and Scipio tears his eyes from his salvation and ceases his powerful swimming to look back, only to find the white ructure she’s made on the surface of the water. He drifts for a moment in pure panic, unsure what to do, pulled powerfully between two worlds. Then with an involuntary cry, he swims back to her. Once again Abby finds the surface, and he sees for one moment her panicked eyes in the faint light of the moon, and he will never forget the sight of her desperation. Then she slips below. She fights against the swamping weight of the water, thrashing violently, striving for its glistening black surface, but her body clamps in on itself as if the child were struggling mightily within her. Her legs draw up suddenly in a wrenching spasm, and her arms whip wildly about and spin for purchase until she finds Scipio’s leg, which she grips with all the life force bestowed upon her by right of her own birth. Without warning, she yanks him beneath the surface, and with blind horror, Scipio kicks downward. Quick as lightning, guided only by instinct, his foot finds her belly. Her hands release, and like a stone, Abby drops away.
Now Scipio fights for the shore as if the devil himself were after him. He’s weeping in horror and drinking the river as he goes, sick with panic and making no effort at all to conceal his passage but only trying to escape death, which would drag him with its iron shackles down to the bottom of the river. He crashes desperately through the sucking current until he finally feels the stony riverbed beneath his bare feet and lurches out, stumbling like a drunk among the rocks and fallen branches. On the bank, he looks like a madman, his hair matted and soaked with the spit of the river, his jaw loose, his eyes horribly wide. He touches his face with a shaking hand as if startled to discover that he is alive, but God, she is dead and he has killed her! He whips around once in disbelief to face the water. How he has longed for this moment since he was a child and now … The river is speaking to him, its words a curse. He stumbles back, away from the sound. Ten steps and the words are a mere prattle. Ten more and the prattle is a whisper. Ten more and the whisper is just a river flowing silent and black, no more dangerous than fiction, no more true than myth. Trembling, he whips around toward the thousand firelight twinklings of Cincinnati a mere mile to the west. His broad, white-latticed back is a curtain drawn on the crude festival of the South. But oh, reader, now Scipio has found something worse than slavery, and will live fifteen more years trying to forget it. There are tales that are remembered and tales that are forgotten, but all tales are born to be told. They demand it; the dead become tales in order to live. Their eternal life is in your mouth.
4
THE SURVIVAL MACHINE
What god requires a sacrifice of every man, woman, and child three times a day?
—YORUBA RIDDLE
Breathe.
Her graying hair was wrapped in a messy bun, her coffee was black and hot, her gear bag packed with syringes, tail bandages, Therapogen, and thermometers as always, but the truth? Lou didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t just because leaving her husband’s side at four in the morning was akin to leaving the warmth and safety of the womb. She couldn’t shake the dream she’d woken from with a start: the numinous horse, off-white as a shell’s nacre, the way it opened its sickeningly lopsided mouth and emitted a hellish sound like the shriek of an old steamboat calliope, that failed music designed to replace church bells in Cincinnati. And then to be woken by the girl’s voice—the Forge daughter, now the farm manager for her father, his right hand. Flat, affectless voice, cold like a stone you couldn’t warm even if you tossed it in a fire. She’d called to say Seconds Flat had been streaming milk down her legs for two days and was agitated now, though she’d shaped up nicely over the last week. The girl—no, the woman, she was probably twenty-five—was smart and not prone to drama; if a 4:00 a.m. phone call was necessary, then Lou was needed directly.
Be in your center. As she drove, Lou welcomed the dark morning into her lungs and thanked the world for this offing day with the old meditative habits: witness, gratitude, devotion, coffee. But deep down, she knew she was just dragging her heart along like an old can on a string. There was a dread in her belly, and her body never lied, just as an animal’s body never lied. It had nothing to do with a difficult parturition, which could leave everyone exhausted and heartbroken if an animal was lost, and everything to do with where she was going. As her husband—a man who’d lost his filter many years ago—liked to say: Those Forges are motherfucking nuts.
Breathe.
She switched on her brights outside of Paris, casting the rural world into cameratic relief. The old fenced oaks made strange figural silhouettes, a stray horse caught her headlights with globular luminescent eyes, the colorless January frost gleamed—and she breathed in the peace, this dark reservoir of quiet free to those who worked third shift and poor souls like her, who worked any and all shifts every day. But her peace was brief; she was slowing down along Forge Run Creek and the turnoff. She used to come here as a shy teenager with her father, the famously irascible and opinionated Doc Jenkins. Back then, everyone had called her Lulu or Baby Lou. When she’d announced at the age of fifteen that she intended to become a vet, her father was at first dismissive, then disbelieving, then truly angry. “Women don’t have what it takes to be veterinarians!” he’d yelled, and then listed her faults—too sensitive, too quick to tears—none of which she could deny and none of which deterred her. He’d forgotten that she was also stubborn, practical, and taught by five older brothers to move directly into a headwind. When her emaciated little mother, worn half to death by rearing six children and smoking two packs of Burleys a day, had pulled her aside and in her exhausted way said, “Do whatever you want to do, Louisa, but don’t tell your father I said so,” they were kind but wasted words. Lou’s mind was already made up.
Vet school at Cornell had solidified her character as much as it had her understanding of anatomy and chemistry. She wasn’t stoic by nature or tough, couldn’t joke about awful things to lighten a room the way men so often did to blunt their feelings, and everything from dissection to pinching her first foal had moved and frightened her to the limits of her endurance. But she loved animals, and she’d learned another secret from growing up around her brothers: jump in first; the water’s only cold for a few seconds. She had done just that, immersing herself in experience and developing a calm appended of self-assurance, which made her the envy of everyone she worked with. She was the clearest thinker, the quickest diagnostician, the steadiest hand, the eye in any veterinary storm. And if anyone had asked her the secret to her success, it was simple: feel your fear but don’t give it any undue respect.
Breathe and be awake.
Forge Run Farm spread darkly before her now as she parked her F250 under the coping of the broodmare barn. Like a muted invitation, yellow light seeped from the door and window fittings. She slipped between the sliding doors with a cursory “I’m here,” shedding her green Carhartt jacket and scrubbing up to the biceps at the work sink, while the Forge girl was managing Seconds Flat. The mare had backed her rump against the stall wall, and Lou was about to warn them when she saw how Henry Forge stood at the girl’s side, marginally too close, one hand on the neck of the agitated horse and one low on his daughter’s opposite hip, so they were touching ankle to shoulder like a sewn seam.
Lou turned back to the sink, startled, and gazed down unseeing as the water rushed over her cracked and weathered hands. She blinked a half dozen times. She only turned again when she heard—or felt—Henry’s approach. His face, a face so beautiful it was made for movies, was taut with worry and fatigue. He said, “Her
water bag broke as you were driving over. She had three hard contractions and then nothing. We got her up, and we’ve kept her there.”
Now this was something other than mere agitation, this was not a pregnancy gone too long, this was indeed a reason to hurry. Lou darted past Henry, the moment of that strange touch already forgotten, angling toward the stall where the oak partition had been removed for the foaling. There, the musky bloom of animal odor was cut by the astringency of antiseptic. Without apology or explanation, Lou took hold of the headstall from Henrietta and drew the mare forward into the space away from the wall that could interrupt the extension of a tiny foreleg.
“Bring that foal out at any cost,” Henry said from beyond the other side of the stall. “I’d rather lose the mare than the foal.”
Lou’s brow wrinkled: a foal is not a dividend. If you need a durable investment, get a dog or a cow. A horse, like a cat, is delicate. A horse is just four legs and a will to die.
Breathe.
Seconds Flat came forward, febrile sweat beading where her stomach bossed out, kicking up a bit with her front legs at her own foundering labor. With a gentle and confident touch that belied the race against time and dwindling oxygen, Lou drew the massive dam down onto her stout belly, then rolled her onto her side, so her legs stiffed out in a porcine manner. A moment later, Lou was crouched at the rear of the horse, drawing the wrapped tail aside and reaching in past the vulvar lips. There she felt the slippery gray sac that contained the foal. The problem was immediately apparent and simple—well, simple if the foal was still alive—the leading hoof was wedged tight like a support beam against the roof of the birth canal. With care, Lou slit the opalescent sac with her gear scissors, then cupped that sharp little hoof with her hand and waited. There was the briefest of pauses, then an involuntary movement as the leg realigned itself, then a contraction pressed in from all sides, wringing the foal so it inched forward. It was clear now it was still alive, but Lou reported nothing from the deep privacy of concentration. When the bony nose appeared, she curled the sac away from the nostril. A healthy little blue tongue protruded. Another contraction and the foal slid forward, wet and dark with a marmoreal gleam, its sculpted head draped down motionless into the straw, fluid streaming from the nostrils. No one dared breathe until it jerked once and inhaled raggedly. Lou continued to roll back the sac until the foal was free—discrete, sound, and separated from its mother save for the long, pulsing rope of umbilical cord.