All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  The three of them shared a room in the servant’s quarters and one night, Cecelia lay there, listening to them argue the subject.

  “Only trouble can come of it,” her mother said, and there was such anger in her voice. Cecelia could never summon the same feeling for the woman that rose so naturally in her for Grandam or Mistress Anne. There was a meanness in her mother; there was something hard.

  “Listen, now,” her grandam said, “anything gets them folks to take a better interest in her is all to the good. And don’t you go getting crossways over it.”

  Her mother said, “And how will it be for her among her own? This attention will set her apart. Just you watch.”

  “Shoo,” said her grandam, “you don’t know.”

  “Mark it,” her mother said.

  “You mark this here, missy: somebody or other’s jealous.”

  She waited for her mother to say that she wasn’t, but instead the woman rose and left the room.

  Her grandam muttered to herself a while. Cecelia stood from her pallet, crept over and climbed into bed beside her.

  “Yes,” her grandam said, “you come here, baby,” and Cecelia laid her head on the woman’s shoulder, her grandam’s arm around her. She bent to kiss Cecelia’s brow.

  “You are a clever-loving girl. You’re my little augur.”

  When her grandam passed that spring, Cecelia cried and cried. She was losing her only friend. Her grandam had always spoken right at her like the two of them were girls.

  And there was that close feeling, that great soft sweetness. Her grandam’s freckled cheeks. Her brown, shining eyes.

  Anne comforted Cecelia and held her as she wept. She said she’d always loved Cecelia’s grandmother—a fine woman who served the Haverfords without flutter or fuss.

  Her mother was no comfort at all. She seemed relieved Grandam was finally gone.

  “There’ll be changes now,” she told Cecelia. “It’s a considerable amount of suffering in this world. Hear me, girl: this ain’t the last of it.”

  She lectured Cecelia about the dangers of these books she worshipped. They weren’t natural. They took us away from each other.

  “Why you want to sit round staring at scribbles? You think that is life?”

  Cecelia couldn’t explain. It was like going to a place inside yourself where another life sparked. You dreamed, but weren’t sleeping. Voices talked, but there wasn’t any sound.

  One morning, she met Anne in the parlor for her daily lesson and found the woman searching the room, overturning pillows on the settee.

  Anne turned and saw her. She said, “Do you remember where we put your book, honey?”

  “No’um,” she said.

  “Did you take it to your mama’s room?”

  “No’um. It’s always on yon table.”

  Anne stood for several minutes with her brow furrowed. Then she walked over to the bookcase, ran a finger along the spines and took down a slender book with a blue cover.

  “We’ll let Mr. Webster instruct us,” she said.

  This new volume was called The American Spelling Book and in addition to the alphabet it had tables with words of one syllable—big, dig, fig, pig, wig—and words of two syllables—glo ry, gi ant, gra vy, gru el—along with verse for children, teaching them to know their duty:

  A bad life will make a bad end.

  He must live well that will die well.

  He doth live ill that doth not mend.

  In time to come we must do no ill.

  One day, this book too was gone. Anne looked and looked, but it was no great disappointment to Cecelia as she’d already learned its lessons and committed a good deal of the pages to memory.

  She was too big to sit on Anne’s lap anymore. Now they sat side by side, Cecelia reading to her mistress from Aesop’s Fables, pausing only when she happened on a word she didn’t know. At which point Anne would hold the book at arm’s length to tell her the meaning of quantity or obstruction or transgress.

  But when this volume went missing, Master Haverford became involved: the book had been a gift from his grandfather and he suspected Cecelia had stolen it. He sat her down and questioned her at length.

  “And you will swear you did not take it?”

  “She didn’t,” Anne said, who seemed upset that her husband would even accuse her.

  Haverford gave his wife a look.

  “Am I thrashing the child?” he asked. “Let her answer.”

  “I swear,” Cecelia told him. “I touch nothing without Mistress’s leave.”

  Haverford said that was very well. But until the book turned up, there’d be no more lessons.

  She would’ve rather he’d beaten her. The lessons were the best part of the day—not just the learning, but showing her mistress how well she’d learned, that she was just as clever as Grandam always said.

  But the mystery was soon solved: Aesop was discovered under a head of rotting cabbage in the refuse pile. A further excavation unearthed Webster’s blue-backed speller, then the first primer that had disappeared. All three books were badly damaged and Haverford put his servants under such threat of lashing that the story came out: how Cecelia’s mother had been seeing digging through the garbage heap, depositing items in it.

  When asked if this was true, her mother offered no defense. She said she’d accept her stripes without complaint.

  Only, there wouldn’t be any stripes. Cecelia met Anne the next morning, hoping to resume her lessons, but her mistress was sitting there very quiet. Her face was streaked by tears.

  She glanced up and saw Cecelia standing in the doorway.

  She stretched a hand towards her and said, “Come to me, sweet girl.”

  The woman told her that some day she would have a man of her own. She’d see how they got peculiar notions wedged in their brains, and once they did, there was no dislodging them.

  She said Cecelia’s mother was on her way to Richmond. She would serve another family now.

  Then she said something else, but Cecelia didn’t hear. The world started to shimmer. There was a glow at the edges of things.

  I have caused this, she thought, panic climbing the back of her throat.

  That night she lay in the room she’d shared all her life with Grandam and her mother—still on the pallet; she couldn’t bear the thought of being in the bed by herself—her eyes open as the room went dark, then darker. It had never occurred to her how much she’d relied on her mother’s spirit, the presence of her. The woman was hard, but it was the hardness of bedrock, and now Cecelia felt her own foundation crumbling. She had never been afraid before. She’d never been alone.

  It went on like that for some time. It seemed that anything she touched might molder beneath her hand. This chair. The arm of it right here. There hardly seemed to be any substance to it at all.

  Sta bil i ty.

  Firm ness.

  Which was the only thing that seemed to help: finding a word to contain the shape of her thoughts or fears or feelings. This des pair—case it in a box of six sides. This horr or.

  And then she met her mistress in the parlor one morning and Anne was holding the thickest book she’d ever seen.

  It was a poem called The Odyssey—that meant journey, Anne said—and it was the story of a man stranded far from home. He had to undergo trials while returning to his family, terrible trials with monsters and witches and strange transformations. Men turned into beasts and back again. A woman wove her fate and unloomed it every night.

  And there was such courage in this strange, glorious tale. Odysseus was courageous and clever, and when you read his exploits, so were you. You feared with him, loved with him, passing through danger and joy. After a while, the Poem seemed to live inside you.

  She wondered if the opposite could happen. And then it did.

 
It wasn’t your mother you missed, but Pen el o pe.

  It wasn’t Haverford you kept an eye on, but Pol y phem us.

  You weren’t a slave girl of nine years, but a king who journeyed far and wide, a Wand’rer in lands remote.

  That was useful, wasn’t it? A life you could endure.

  Take it in bits as short as syllables—the fear and panic, the loneliness and hurt— wrapping each second in poetry, line by line by line.

  DUNCAN LAMMONS

  —TEXAS, 1841—

  Juan had a smoothbore British musket which he carried in a scabbard made from an old pant leg. While this might have been a lethal instrument in the Old World where men formed up in ranks to mass their fire and hurl volleys, in a company where you had to aim a weapon rather than merely level it, he might as well’ve carried a mesquite branch. I decided he ought to make friends with our Kentucky rifle.

  I procured him a good cap-lock—John Hall’s patent—and zeroed the gun myself, filing down the front sight until it would shoot palm-sized groups at 100 yards.

  A few mornings after he’d related the tale of his abduction by the Berbers, I shook him awake before the other men had risen and the two of us walked down from camp to where I’d set up several slabs of limestone against a grassy hill, the white rock standing out against the green—a brighter target than any Indian would present, I assure you.

  I spent some time instructing him on how to judge distance, read the wind, measure charges and patch balls, and when at last we got down to shooting, Juan impressed me yet again—not for any special talent he had for marksmanship, but for his ability to take in everything I told him without question or argument. I knew from long, frustrated experience that if a man has ever touched a firearm, you can hardly teach him a thing. Or if you do manage it, you’d best prepare to listen to all he thinks he knows on the subject.

  And so, simply by virtue of being able to receive instruction, Juan proved almost a prodigy. I told him to lie on his belly and he lay on his belly. I told him to get his heels down and down they went. If I’d tried to improve McClusky’s marksmanship, or even Levi’s, I’d have had to argue like a senator. But in a few hours, Juan was shooting very well indeed, and I knew with several more sessions, he’d be a dependable rifleman, though you could never guarantee how a man would hold up under fire. You didn’t really know how you’d react yourself.

  * * *

  Of course, we were all eager for Juan to resume his story of his time among the Berbers. Or all except McClusky, who regarded our new trooper with a combination of curiosity and disdain.

  And yet, it was the Irishman himself who bid Juan to continue his tale, glancing over at him as we sat round the fire after supper.

  “So,” McClusky said, “you were in the clutches of pirates and pashas and the rest. What then, Spaniard? How’d you come to cross an ocean and grace us with your presence?”

  Juan smoked his pipe.

  He said, “It is another story, how I traveled the sea.”

  “Aye,” said McClusky. “I’m asking you to tell it. Or do you need more time to cook it up?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nevermind him,” I told Juan. “It’s some men have a peculiar way of showing interest.”

  Juan stared into the fire. The men were all watching him. When we’d just about decided no sequel was forthcoming, Juan said: “I was made woodcutter.”

  “How’s that?” McClusky said.

  “A woodcutter,” Juan told him. “For the pasha. He sends me to work in the hills behind the city. To cut timber for the ships. To mend what is broken.”

  “You built ships?” Levi said.

  Juan shook his head. “I gather the wood that builds them.”

  He puffed at his pipe a few moments, then began to unfold a tale of labor so backbreaking I could feel it in my joints. Lacking any rivers to raft the lumber they cut to the shipyards, they were forced to drag tree trunks over hill and dale, working under threat of the driver’s whip.

  “And I am realizing,” he said, “why the pasha has chosen me, that it is for the strength I have built climbing trees, gathering bananas for mi abuela. All the climbing has make me very strong. And so, I am unsure again of my path: mi abuela or Mamá? Both have brought great troubles.” He stopped and looked around at us. “What is the way a man must live his life? The Christian or pagano? Is it the devil who threatens our soul or the Lumia mi abuela talks of? I am between these two and cannot decide.”

  I cleared my throat. “Did you ever consider doing like your priest and swapping out?”

  “To become a musulmán?”

  “Jesus, Cap,” said Levi. “Are you forgetting how he said they confirmed the padre?”

  Juan said, “I tell myself whatever is the case, I will not take up the ways of the Musulmanes. It will be Mamá’s or mi abuela’s. But never the man who have made an esclavo of me.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  Juan nodded. He told us how he labored from the age of twelve to fifteen, hauling trees from the hills around Algiers. And then how the pasha had him brought to the palace one day.

  “I am to be a gift,” he said. “To the divan in Istanbul. I will board a ship that very day.”

  “And what’s a divan?” Levi asked. “Is that a lord?”

  “He is un agente. In the Sultan’s gobierno. The pasha smiles at me and says my life is becoming better now.”

  And so young Juan was sent to Istanbul.

  He painted us quite the picture of that faraway city, a great forest of spires and turrets, sloping down to the ship masts of the harbors where an orange sun sank into bright blue water. The domed temples where the muezzins called worshippers from their minarets. And at night, candles in the tower windows like a hundred thousand stars.

  He was taken to the divan’s home—a kind man, Juan said, but he barely got to know him. His second week in the city, the divan hired him out to a consul from Sweden.

  “Hired you out?” I asked.

  “Yes. The divan tells me I am to be a servant for this man and his wife. And so I am.”

  “He paid the divan for your time?”

  “Si.”

  “But not you, I don’t reckon.”

  “No,” he said. “Not me.”

  “Did the Swede speak Spanish?” Levi asked.

  “He speaks everything,” Juan said. “Ingles, frances, persa. His own language, of course. It is his job to do so.”

  “Like an ambassador?” I said.

  “Very much.”

  “Well,” said Levi, “least you weren’t strictly in the hands of Moslems anymore. Or not as much, I suppose.”

  Juan drew on his pipe. He looked into the fire. Two tongues of flame flickered in his eyes.

  “Not at much,” he said. “Though I will wish it.”

  “Why’d you wish that?” Levi said. “Had to be some kind of improvement for you. Swedes are white, ain’t they?”

  “Si,” said Juan. “The embajador William Nilsson; his wife is called Saga. For fifteen years I am their servant. But it is not improved. It is a time of hell.”

  He told us how he lived in the same residence as the Swede and his wife. Here, everything had to come up to the standard of the big bugs: the fixings served at their table, all the silverware and crockery, the pillows and cushions and furniture.

  And their servants as well. He brought in a tutor for young Juan, a scholar named Ahmed—a small, spectacled man, gentle in his speech and graceful in comportment. It was Ahmed who expanded Juan’s rudimentary grasp of the written word to encompass the Latin Bible, English poetry, the French and Turkish tongues. He taught Juan his lovely manners and instructed him how to wait at table, even schooled him in the art of grease wrestling, the Turk’s form of grappling. Juan developed great affection for the man and he proved a fine pupil.

&nb
sp; And as Juan was describing his education and the clerical duties he performed for the consul, McClusky stopped him.

  “You said this was a hell, Spaniard.”

  Juan smoked his pipe and studied the Irishman a moment. “It is the worst time of my life.”

  “I don’t see it,” McClusky said.

  “What don’t you see?”

  McClusky shook his head. “You tell us you were taken from your home by Moslem pirates, branded and sold like a mule and set to work dragging trees. You watched your priest’s bod peeled by Saracen daggers. And here now you’re clerking for an ambassador and studying poetry like a monk. Where’s the hell in that?”

  Well, for once McClusky had a point. Juan’s fortune seemed to’ve changed in every respect.

  “There are very many hells,” Juan said.

  McClusky snorted.

  “And is this one of them?” he said, gesturing at us. “Loung­ing here with the lads telling stretchers? Do these embers conjure the eternal bonfire for you as well? Or might you be level-full of shite?”

  I thought the Irishman had gone a bit far with his needling, but McClusky knew no other way to go. He purely loved to goad a fellow.

  But Juan was a hard one to rattle and instead of explaining these many hell fires he’d referenced, he skipped his story forward fifteen years to tell us how he was released from bondage and came to sojourn with us in our Republic.

  And here again he difficulted us, for after hearing the horrible tale of his abduction, we all expected that the account of his escape from the hands of his tormentors would make our hair stand on end.

  But the story of his deliverance was simply this: “In the year 1830, the Sultan issues a firman freeing esclavos europeos throughout the Empire, and I am allowed to take a ship to the port of Nice.”

  “Then what?” Levi said.

  “Then I am free,” Juan told him.

  We all just sat staring at him.