by C. E. Morgan
“I…,” she stalled.
“Dan Barlow,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“Barlow—”
“Jamie Barlow? My dad was your all’s farm manager from back in ’73 until—”
“Oh my God!” Henrietta cried, her eyes widening. “Old Barlow!”
“Yeah, that was my dad.”
“Oh!” Her gasp was quick and involuntary, the tiniest spear piercing the brittle veneer between past and present. One hand rose trembling to cover her lips as she took in the look of this man, stout and sure like his father, but redder and thicker about the middle. “Oh, how is your father? Tell me how he is,” she said, her words like a plea.
A mild surprise registered, and the man shifted his considerable weight. He passed a hand down his satiny jacket front. “Well, Dad passed back in ’93. Uh, he, you know, he didn’t last too long after Mother went, which was, shoot, back in … well, that was in early ’92, I reckon. I’m so sorry you didn’t know. I called your dad myself to give him the news.”
Old Barlow was dead? Her eyes filled with fast, unbidden tears. The man had always called her his strange bird, his funny valentine. He had looked at her as though she were the most interesting and precious person in the world. And never once had he told her who to be.
Now his son said, “That happens a lot, you know. One passes and the other can’t hang on too long. Dad always relied on Mother to keep him on the path. Maybe a little too much. Lost his spark a bit when she went. I think he didn’t have as much purpose without her.”
“I never visited him,” Henrietta said. “After he retired. I told him that I would.” Guilty tears threatened to spill down her face.
There was surprise on the man’s face again. He observed her tears. “Well, now,” he said, and inched closer and, with the awkward kindness of an aging bachelor farmer, slumped his heavy hand down on her shoulder and patted her stiffly but gently. “You were just a kid, just a little girl. You had no cause to worry about visiting an old man like that. Besides, Dad’s last couple years weren’t pretty. He wouldn’t have wanted you to see him that way.”
Henrietta couldn’t speak at all, so he just patted her shoulder again and went on, “Dad sure did care for you, though,” but then his own voice caught, and they looked at each other, bewildered by the density of emotion building in the midst of the Keeneland crowd. “Yes, he cared for you very much. I remember he always said if he had a daughter, he’d want one just like you. Said you were smarter than he was when you were still in elementary school. He always did admire a smart woman. That’s why he married Mother.”
Tears slipped raggedly down Henrietta’s unguarded face. Her voice, when it emerged, sounded young. “Do you”—she said—“do you think he forgave me?”
“For what, honey?”
“For forgetting…”
The man, anticipating the gravity of her reply, had leaned in to offer her his good ear, but now he faced her squarely and said, “You got nothing to worry about. Dad was good with horses, but he was even better with people. He was a very loving man. I never saw him hurt a fly.”
“Yes, but do you think he forgave me?”
The man’s brow was furrowed, and he said, “Why, I believe forgiveness and love are the same thing. Don’t you?”
* * *
Partially awake: soft and gray as old ashes, doves bob on the windowsill, warbled faintly by the rilled glass, so their contours flex and bell beyond their actual shape. They touch beaks as if kissing and their elegant heads merge, partially distorted. She’s barely aware of watching them until one dove taps the glass with its slate beak, and the sound carries, as well as the sounds of the woken world.
Mourning doves mate for life; she’s seen evidence of it herself. One day when she was fourteen years old, she discovered a dead dove on her morning walk. A mess of chine and feather and chalky eyewhite, the thing had been done in by a prowling cat or some other predator. Above, on a phone line that swooped along the edge of the property, a gray dove cooed, very much alive. She thought nothing of it; there were birds everywhere. But the next morning, the violent bed of feathers remained, and the perched dove cooed overhead—and the next morning and the next, that bird sang its persistent, increasingly dreadful song. It remained there above the disappearing body of its mate for three whole months until only a beak remained and all other bones had long been carried away. For all she knew, it remained there still. She had learned not to look.
If Jamie Barlow, that good and kind man, was dead, then truly every other being would also die. Death must be real and not just some story people told.
An old vase—a family antique—had been tottering on its rim for a long time. Now it finally broke.
She didn’t make herself pretty; she never had any interest in anything like that. She just went to him. She found him exactly where she knew he would be in the stallion barn, mucking and grooming, cleaning up someone else’s mess. At first, he was unaware and moved with the ease of the unobserved, and then, some near-dormant animal sense alerted him, and he turned with the smallest of starts. He looked at her, then beyond her, through the drawn sliders of the barn door toward the house, which was enormous, almost overpowering the constraints of the aperture.
“Can we start over?” she asked, but at first he didn’t take a step toward her, because if he moved, he would no longer see the house. But when she tugged on his hand, he followed.
She saw how his pupils were big, voluptuous. She was on her knees before him in the hay, the smell of tack stronger than the smell of two people with their blood rising. He stared down at her, almost repelled as she took him in her mouth. What he felt most keenly was the cold air on his buttocks. Denuded in the almost dark, he shivered. He didn’t want her to see his body, but he dissolved into the shadows of the room, and he could only know himself to be where her hands traced. She was moving on him, as if trying to suck up the very source of his male life while he leaned against the door, straining against into away from her, then sinking down, and she was shimmying out of her jeans, opening and widening.
Shocked by his own nudity, he felt—was—inexpert and extremely cold.
“God, you have a beautiful body,” she said. It made him cringe, because she thought it was a compliment.
Then he was falling into her and again and again, entirely unsure, and there was almost no pleasure in it, only imperative, the body driving toward its denouement. The anxiety of it snuffed any pleasure. He didn’t know how to do this, and yet somehow he did. It was the most natural thing in the world.
She was under him and she remained under him, receiving him without a sound, as if she was curious or amazed, ushering him into her with an undulating tight that made him make sounds like a low song, sung just for her, rising in tempo and volume with each refrain of desire or need or force until he drove into her as if he would break her, the smacking sounds alarming him as much as they turned him on, and then he was done, hunched over her and sweating, his arms trembling with rageful exhaustion and confusion.
She held him tight until he withdrew, and only then did she make a sound, one long, low, lonesome moan, which sounded more like desire than any sound he had made.
He couldn’t move; he remained hunched over her, catching his breath for a stunned and exhausted time, inadvertently letting her look at him. He only escaped her gaze when he eventually returned to the workers’ quarters on the far side of the property, submerged himself in a tub of water, and covered his face with his hands. Then he was too tired to beat back an insistent memory and recalled someone saying to him somewhere sometime long ago: “Son, the common language of God and man is morality.”
* * *
It’s an old story, how on a late summer evening, Daniel Boone was out with a friend hunting deer at the edge of a farmer’s field. They were shining the eyes—which is to say, his friend was carrying a flaming pine torch as he rode along on his horse, directing the light at the forest and its thickets, and attracting the
shining eyes of all the species within. As the horseman moved slowly along, Boone followed behind on his mount, his rifle at the ready, trained on the shadows in the woods.
Suddenly, Boone saw a pair of bright eyes. He made a quick motion for his friend to stop, then slipped silently from his saddle. He trained his firearm on the spot where he had seen the animal, steadied himself, and prepared to take the shot. But something stayed his hand—a too-long moment of hesitation, suspicion, or some strange intuition. He withdrew his finger from the trigger and pointed the rifle at the ground.
Soon there was a rustling in the thicket. When the deer emerged, it was wearing a dress. There stood the neighbor’s blonde daughter, Rebecca, in plain sight of her would-be murderer. She was beautiful. They were soon married, of course.
* * *
So there were trysts, but the trysts were preceded by words, which at first sounded to Allmon like some old song-and-dance routine directed by overheated white girls who needed you to shuck and jive before they’d moan and writhe beneath you, asking you to pump the pump of you until you spilled your come. The first few times he was always watching from up in the rafters— What the fuck are you doing in a barn, Allmon Shaughnessy, son of Mike Shaughnessy, lothario, Irish agnate, collector, and disregarder of children, you fucking half-white fuck?
This was supposed to be what a man lived for—sex machine. So why could you only feel it in one little spot, the head of your dick, while all the rest of you was tied up in old rope. God forbid that rope begin to fray or loosen—holy shit, then his whole life would come spilling out of the shape of him; he would start to feel forbidden things in his body, like the kisses she began to press against his neck, or the touch that was maybe not just desire but something softer than that. Or the look in her eyes, which was softening too, more with each encounter. No. NO. He wasn’t fucking her, he was fucking through her keyhole into the house on the other side.
“Tell me where you come from,” she said.
How can I tell you? No one ever told me.
“What were you like as a child?”
Ugly.
“What’s your mother like?”
A tisket a tasket, a gray and glossy casket.
Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me
Shut upShut upSHUTUP!!!!!!
The real questions were his, shining around him like a whitened, heated aura, and he tried to hang on to them with what remained of his dwindling reserve: How much is that house worth, how much are you worth? How come you think you deserve all this when I don’t? I had a white father too, but nobody’s handing me shit. How much do you think I need to buy one good mare and one share of the best stud? What were you doing the year I turned seventeen? How much do you think I’m ever gonna tell you about my life inside? Nothing, that’s how much. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Because you deserve nothing.
But it was as if she wanted to eat even his silence. She grasped hold of his empty answers, invited them into her, begging him for pleasure or perhaps something else that had begun in the shape of pleasure but was swiftly outgrowing it. She was moving steadily over him, asking and asking and asking to be let loose from the awful hames that constricted her, and then she was coming with great cries and convulsions into openness without care for who heard or knew. She wanted it all—the heavy, burdened brow, his face like a secret, his dark, long chest with its trembling inhalations, his cock, the contours of which she could draw with her tongue. And sometimes as she was moving over him, Allmon’s body betrayed him and he was suddenly lost, swimming in the new space that opened up between two bodies but that aroused a terror even stronger than desire—he was losing his purchase on his old resentments, and he couldn’t relearn his resistance. Something was growing in him too. In desperation, he tried one last trick: he learned to play the old, instinctive game of postcoital sleep, so that when she resumed her questions, finally asking, “What was it like in prison, Allmon?” his only reply was silence, and when she turned her head to inquire again, he was asleep, his chest so still, it appeared he was dead.
* * *
But he couldn’t last; he broke. She came to him one morning at seven, an hour set brazenly in the light; he realized she had walked straight across the property, abandoning any need for privacy, his or hers. She had always been so secretive before, and yet here she came, tugging off her clothes in the daylight, naked before she was even on his bed.
“Allmon,” she said, and that too struck him as a new curiosity, the way she said his name. It was big and round like a dipper that could hold him. When he looked at her face, he saw what looked like wonder or the joy of discovery, something as bold as the morning light itself. It jarred him; he looked away. But she reached with both hands and turned his face toward her, so he could see her as she undressed him. It was so clear that she was taking joy in this—in him—but that was too much, almost repugnant. He tried to turn away, but then she climbed over him and pressed him into her. She was entirely concentrated, her body so open, they were soon one strong rhythm, and he felt he was becoming her or maybe the other way around. Then she was pulling him over her, and it was Allmon who was making sounds now, release pressing up through reluctance, some kind of desperate song as she was saying please, please, please like the only thing she wanted in this world was for him to come inside her with nothing between them, and the rise and fall was coming—but it wasn’t orgasm this time, it was the other wave, the great worst wave from forever ago, suffocating and dreadful, about to crest over him now, and he was off her in an instant, hunched over and dry heaving beside her, his body wracked.
“My God,” Henrietta said, too surprised at first to move, jerked from the sex and the warmth into the cold. Then she recovered herself and reached out for him, but Allmon extended one forearm and pushed her back, shaking his head like a wounded bear.
“No,” he choked, swallowing hard, struggling to hold himself in.
“Allmon.” Henrietta’s voice was soft—that change had come once they started having sex; it was a woman’s voice like he had never heard before. “Allmon, what’s wrong?”
He just shook his head, back and forth, back and forth, hunched. Henrietta lay there on her side and observed him for a moment, the only thing he would allow her to do. She took her time considering all the confounding details of his downcast face, then said, “Allmon, tell me why you’re not free with me.”
It was so unexpected, so absurd, he laughed from his hunched position—but it was an ugly sound, like a bark. Wholly dismissive.
“What?” she said, but not rearing back.
When words came, they were as cutting as any knife blade: “White people—!” he blurted.
“White people what?”
He was ready—even wanted—her words to be sharp too, but they weren’t, and when he looked over quickly at her face, it remained open, curious. He didn’t know whether to believe in the openness he saw there, or whether it was some kind of trick.
“Y’all don’t get it. You really don’t,” he muttered, hate now beginning to stanch his tears.
“Get what?” she said. “I don’t understand you.”
When he spoke, he spat. “No, you don’t!” His words were launched arrows. “Y’all fuck up our lives for fucking hundreds of years and then tell us we aren’t free? What the fuck! Can you even hear yourself?”
Henrietta didn’t defend herself, and he didn’t know what to do if he couldn’t get her to fight, to hate him back. So he waved his hand abruptly, confusion suddenly present, regret tannic like blood in his mouth. “I don’t even know if I mean you anymore,” he said, but he did, because she was like a white pebble on a white beach that ran all the way around the world, containing all the oceans she had seen and he hadn’t.
Henrietta’s touch interrupted the roiling of his mind. Something was moving in her, emerging out of shadow into consciousness. She was seeing the real Allmon, and she knew it. Her hand was light when it stroked the hard slope of his shoulder, then tugged insistentl
y at his arm.
“Tell me about prison,” she said, but her words were salt in that wound.
He didn’t even hesitate. “No. That ain’t never gonna happen.”
“Why not? Don’t you trust me?”
He shook his head. “I can’t trust myself.”
“Trust yourself to what?”
Still looking at the ground, he said very deliberately, “If I said my life out loud, I don’t know what I’d do. So don’t push me.”
She didn’t. When she did finally speak again, she said simply, “Allmon, I just don’t want you to be unfree with me.”
He made a hateful, smirking face.
“What’s the most unfree thing about you?”
He half laughed, still dismissive, but wouldn’t look at her face. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about. Forget it. Seriously.”
“Allmon, what’s still holding you prisoner?”
The blood rushed to his face. It came so fast, he felt dizzy. He shook his head, looking at the ground.
“Tell me. Please,” she said, and only held him more firmly when he tried to pull back from her hand on his arm.
“Fuck,” he said, blinking. His voice was thick.
“Tell me.”
Suddenly, he rocked back on his heels, naked there beside her, his arms raised. He looked furious when he pounded once at his chest, a single thud. “Hurt!” he roared, like she had caused it.
Henrietta wasn’t afraid of his anger but was totally confused. “Hurt? Like physical pain?”
He shook his head angrily.
“Grief?”
He nodded violently then, his neck straining, his eyes feeling wild like they didn’t know where to look. He tried once, tried again. “My momma, my life—” he choked out.
“What?”
“Died!”
Henrietta rose onto her elbow, her brow wrinkled. “Your mother died?”
He didn’t move for a moment, a wave of utter self-disgust wrenching his heart. Then he blurted, “Fuck!” like he’d made some awful mistake, and he spat a little when he said that, so he lowered his head in embarrassment, and then as if his bowed head were granting permission, he began to cry, first with a strange, strangled sound and then huge sobs. Henrietta was off the mattress in an instant like an animal taking flight; she grabbed at Allmon, half in alarm, half in affection, but that only made it worse.