All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  I gathered a pile of brush and built a fire atop the grave. If you didn’t, there was a smart chance the Indians would dig up the body and scalp it. This way, all they’d see was charred limbs and ash, assume it was a campfire, and move on.

  And leave you out here, I thought. No coffin or cairn.

  Yes. The world scranched beauty between its teeth and ground it into nothing.

  I rode back to the cabin and got Robert fed—cold corn dodgers and a few pieces of pork—then sat there trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t think the cowards would ride on me that night, but I knew men who didn’t dare look at you in daylight might burn you alive come sundown. By dark, I’d packed my guns, a few tools and blankets, some cornmeal and dried venison, and with Robert sleeping in the saddle, I took a cattle trail north, leaving my property and this life I’d built behind.

  * * *

  We spent the next several months up on Brushy Creek, living in a dugout beside the river. Our only neighbors were Noah and his family. Noah’s gun shop wasn’t doing much business, but he’d scrounged up a herd of wild cattle and was making a go of it with his wife and his nephew, John Hubbard. I told him of Sam’s death, and he took the news very hard.

  “What was the cause of it?” he asked. “Was there a dispute?”

  I was leery of naming Cecelia to him, and I did not mention that the boy sitting in the grass beside me was Samuel’s son. I thought Noah would be of the same mind as I was, but I meant to protect Robert as best as I could.

  “They wanted his headrights,” I said. “They bogused an old Spanish grant and Sam wouldn’t budge.”

  His face colored. He said, “They did the same thing to Mother Blakeley.”

  “I told Sam about it,” I said.

  “Did he have an agent?”

  “He was supposed to’ve hired Joel Ponton.”

  “I know Joel,” he said. “Did he not look into it?”

  “I don’t know if he looked or he didn’t. Next time I saw Sam, he was lying there in the dirt.”

  Noah stood there. I don’t know that I’d ever seen him so angry.

  “You know who did for him?”

  “I know.”

  “What do you aim to do?”

  “I reckon I’m doing it,” I said.

  Which didn’t seem to satisfy him at all. He glanced down at Robert and studied him for several moments, his brows furrowed up like caterpillars. Then his forehead relaxed. When he looked back up at me, he had a different expression on his face.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I see.”

  “Not a word,” I told him. “Not to anyone.”

  “No,” said Noah. “Not a word.”

  * * *

  Those first months were very hard. If I end up in hell, I’ll feel cheated if I don’t get credit for them.

  Bob had been such a spirited little boy. Now he was careful and quiet.

  I gave him all my attention. I wondered what he’d seen of Sam’s murder and worried what he’d recall in years to come. I remembered Sam telling me about his own pap’s knifing, and it seemed very cruel to think a man could pass on these calamities like a harelip or a stutter.

  I’d fall into a brown study just thinking about it. Lying there at night, a rage would come up in my throat, and I’d have to go outside. I’d stand there staring at the bright tangle of stars. It seemed that God had retreated behind them. There was less and less of Him all the time.

  And Miss Suss, I wondered. Was she alive to be tortured by these notions?

  I didn’t think she was. I wanted to, but I couldn’t see how that was possible. She had been so kind to me.

  “If You’d let it happen to that woman,” I said, “it’s not a soul safe amongst us.”

  After a while, I’d go back in and see Robert sleeping on his pallet, his thin little chest swelling up and sinking. That would settle me. Having someone to care for settled me. The fit would blow on through and I’d get clear inside myself, thinking, He depends on you, Duncan. You best straighten up.

  I’d lay my head down and go to sleep.

  CECELIA

  —TEXAS, 1847—

  She was jostled awake by a creaking rumble, the hard ground shuddering beneath her. It was very cold and the gray sky pressed against her face. Something was wrong; her skull was humming; pain lanced behind her eyes. The earth continued to tremble, the sky weighed down, and after a while she came to understand it wasn’t ground or sky either one. She was lying under a screen of burlap in the bed of a wagon, and as her vision sharpened, she saw the earth passing below her through a gap in the boards and heard a horse’s hooves striking dirt.

  Her wrists were tied together, her ankles tied; she lay on her side with her knees to her chest, a grown child in a travelling womb. Lord, how her brain hurt! It was very hard to think, like startling from a dream and not recognizing the waking world, your body heavy with sleep. Part of her knew Sam was gone, and another part of her didn’t see how that could be.

  You are the one, she thought. You’re the one that’s gone.

  That first day, she wept soundlessly, but it wasn’t any kind of weeping she’d ever done. It was like watching herself weep—her eyes leaked and her body ached, but she was high up inside herself thinking, Look at you. You’re the most miserable thing that ever lived. You are shaped for misery. You draw it like bugs to a fire.

  Then her brain would begin to pulse and she couldn’t think at all. Days passed, or she passed in and out. She wasn’t always clear. There were images she couldn’t fit together. She knew—or thought she knew—that she’d been clubbed in the head; she saw it like a painting: a man walking up and striking her with the butt of his rifle.

  But how could that be? You can’t see yourself from the outside. What is wrong with you?

  Then another thought like a slap: They killed my Sam.

  And then Robert would flash in her mind and her entire body would be painful and panicked.

  No, she told herself. You cannot do that now. Not if you ever want to see his face.

  * * *

  She’d decided there were several men driving the wagon, at least two, but when they stopped to make camp, it was only one: a young man, little more than a boy, with dark hair and big brown eyes. He made a fire, offered her beans and bread, but she would neither eat nor answer him.

  He told her his name was Davy. He asked if she needed to relieve herself again, and she thought, Again?

  What else had she done that she couldn’t remember?

  He asked her again after supper. He seemed quite worried about it. He was the most nervous man she’d ever been around and she wondered if she frightened him. Then she knew she did. Which was strange. It didn’t seem possible he hadn’t killed her yet, and she thought that if he kept her alive, there could only be one reason. A conversation spooled out in her thoughts: a circle of men standing round, after they’d knocked her senseless, discussing her fate. She couldn’t believe she was just imagining it.

  Maybe I’m not. Maybe part of me was awake and took it in. Maybe I heard without hearing.

  What sense does that make? They must’ve clubbed you pretty hard.

  Still, the voices were so clear:

  And what’re we supposed to do?

  Do about what?

  About her. You ask me, we’re fools to let her live.

  She’s money. That’s a hunk of money lying there.

  That’s a witness lying there. The clean thing would be to blow out her lamp.

  You’ve an objection to feathering your nest?

  My objection is to the noose.

  Won’t be a noose, the man said.

  * * *

  The following night, she lay in front of another campfire, thinking how, only a handful of days before, she been lying in bed next to Sam, begging him to let it go. She could
close her eyes and picture him, and she thought maybe all of this was a dream; she’d open her eyes and this horrible new world would vanish and another more familiar one would take its place.

  But when she opened her eyes, it was only Davy sitting on the other side of the fire, this timid young man carrying her to auction.

  He glanced over and gestured with his chin.

  “If you need to do your business,” he said, “you got to let me know.”

  She stared at him. He’d undone her ankle bindings earlier, and now she raised her wrists toward him as well.

  He nodded, stepped over, and helped her to her feet. She could smell the nerves on him. His eyelashes were long and black, faintly feminine.

  He’s afraid of me, she thought. Won’t even look me in the eye.

  Davy gave a soft tug on the knot between her hands.

  “I take this off, you won’t try and go nowhere, will you?”

  She didn’t want to answer him, but there was no other way: “Where would I go?”

  He seemed to agree with the sense of this. He took her very gently by the arm and led her off into the cedars, then spent several minutes fighting with the knot, trying to untie it, squinting to see in the failing light. Finally, he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt and severed her bindings.

  “It wasn’t me who tied that,” he said, and there was something in his voice that asked her approval.

  Then he nodded to her and turned to face the fire.

  She took several steps backward, her legs shaky as a fawn’s. She hiked her filthy dress and squatted.

  I won’t be able to do anything, she thought, but her stream came right away. She started to cry again; there was a kind of betrayal in all this; she wanted her body to rebel against Sam’s murderers just like her mind.

  But the body was only flesh; it manacled you roughly as men.

  When she stood up, Davy still had his back turned to her, staring out toward the fire and the wagon and the horse on its picket line. It occurred to her right then what she would have to do. The sensation was so strong, it was like she’d already done it, and she thought, Yes, this is what the World has starved you down to, this is what you’ll become.

  * * *

  They were on the road another three days, the same one she and Sam had taken on their way out from Natchitoches ten years before: El Camino Real de Los Tejas. The King’s Highway.

  “Old San Antonio Road,” Davy called it.

  The country bore little resemblance to the wilderness Sam had led her through; now there were farms and towns and settlements. And, my Lord, the plantations—cotton plantations like she’d only seen in Mississippi, the fields fallow now, waiting for spring. They’d travelled west while she’d slumbered in her dream of freedom, chasing her down: you no longer walked the earth; the earth moved beneath your feet, scrolling toward the sun.

  Sam had been correct in everything he said: America had come flooding in from the east in a white, rising tide. And how could a body escape drowning?

  It’d swept her whole life away, and now she thought of Robert; now it was impossible not to. Being separated from him was like someone hacking off a limb, only, there was nothing on her that would hurt so much to cut away. It ached and ached. Would they sell him? Would they injure him some way? She refused to believe he was dead, wouldn’t even let the thought pass through her mind.

  Instead, she thought of that traitor, Lammons. The thought of doing him violence felt like a sanctuary. She saw very clearly how it must have been him who’d set this madness in motion, wanting so badly to get Sam to himself that he’d unleashed these demons, destroying the very man he’d wished to claim. Likely, he’d meant for McClusky to kill her, but Sam did what he always did and forced a fight.

  She felt sure that Lammons would know where Robert was being kept. If she made it back to the cabin Sam had built her, would she find Lammons living in it like a shrine? There was only one way to find out.

  Each night, Davy would stop the wagon and she’d help him collect wood for their fire. He’d come to have a kind of trust for her, though always he took off his belt before lying down, rolling it around his big knife and slipping both inside the folded blanket he used for his pillow. So, he didn’t trust her all the way. It was more like he couldn’t stand for there to be any meanness between them or any silence either. He’d likely spent his childhood being mothered by house servants, black women who fed and pampered him, perhaps even chastened him with his mother’s approval.

  They developed a strange rapport. He never mentioned their destination and as she didn’t plan on them reaching it, she never asked. The young man was another distraction from her grief. He was pretty as a girl, soft-featured. His brown eyes glittered in the firelight. She began to sit beside him on the wagon seat during the daytime, and as they went along, she’d think about what this boy might’ve been if he hadn’t been raised among slavers.

  One evening, they made camp along the banks of the Neches—he said it was the Neches. They ate their supper of bacon and bread, sitting across the fire from each other with blankets around their shoulders, talking about the constellations. The weather had turned cooler, but there wasn’t a single cloud. She pointed out Orion, standing straight and tall in the southwestern sky.

  “How do you know their names?” he asked.

  “I read about them,” she said. “I was lettered by my mistress in Virginia when I was just a girl. I read every book in that house.”

  Davy said, “I don’t think I’ve read a whole book in my life. I read some Bible verses, but I was made to do it. How many books you think you read?”

  It was a good question; she didn’t exactly know.

  She told him how they’d been like food to her, how once she’d lived inside them. She told him about Odysseus and the Poem.

  “There was a time when I thought it was all I’d ever need. I thought as long as I had that book, everything would be all right.”

  “I wished I’d been thataway,” he said. “Probably would’ve saved me some trouble.”

  “No,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I don’t think these books save you any trouble at all. If anything, they cause it.”

  That seemed to interest him; his head tilted to one side like a dog’s.

  “Because you’re Negro?” he said.

  “No. Not because I’m Negro. Because I wanted to be like the people in the stories I read. Maybe I thought I was in a story.”

  “Well,” he said, “I reckon all of us are in some kind of story. Maybe not a book-story, but still.”

  “It’s better not to be,” she said.

  “Not to be what?”

  “In a story. From the time I was fifteen my life was one story after another. And then for ten years there was no story to it. Now, the story’s back again.”

  “Like I say, I think that’s the way with all of us.”

  “Not all,” she said.

  * * *

  She opened her eyes to soft starlight. The sky was cold and clear and she lay watching her breath drift from her mouth like smoke.

  There’s a fire inside you, she thought. There has always been a fire.

  She thought of Robert. It was painful to think of him, but it was the pain of longing, and she knew there was nothing she wouldn’t do to get back to him, nothing in all the world. She glanced over at Davy, lying there asleep.

  The campfire was down to crackling coals. She lay listening to Davy breathing. She sat up in her blankets, got onto her hands and knees, and started to crawl toward him, then knelt on the bed of dry leaves he’d made himself. He was on his left side and she watched his chest rise and fall the way she’d once watched Sam’s. What she was about to do would be very hard, no turning back once it started. It wasn’t that she doubted she could go through with it, only that
she wasn’t entirely sure who she’d be once it was done. She wanted to spend several more minutes as the woman Sam would recognize if he were still here.

  But he’s not still here, is he?

  He’s here inside me. Inside, he’s here.

  She didn’t like the idea he was staring down from some ledge in the sky. She didn’t want him watching what she was about to do. It was better she have him down in her breast where she could talk to him, but he couldn’t see.

  She moved her hand into the blankets under Davy’s head, then placed the other on his shoulder and felt the heat of him.

  “Davy,” she whispered.

  He slept on and she squeezed his shoulder.

  Finally, his breath caught and he rolled onto his back. His eyelids opened a slit and he looked up at her.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  She leaned in closer, feeling him go rigid under her hand, his breathing shallower. Had slave girls once come to him in the night? Had he gone to them?

  She imagined him slipping inside a pinewood shack, bending over the sleeping form of a young woman the way she was now leaning over him, sliding her hand farther inside the blankets, farther and farther until she found the handle of his knife, then gripping it, drawing it from its sheath, from the folds of blankets, and before Davy’s eyes could light on it, she’d passed the blade across his throat, drawing it toward her in the same motion she’d used to dress the deer and turkey Sam had brought in, pulling and pressing down.

  Davy’s eyes sprang wider and he sat up clutching his neck in both hands.

  They stared at each other a moment, their breath mingling, fogging the air between them.

  “Help me,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe she’d slashed him.

  “You’re all right,” she said, then hacked at him with the knife, only cutting his fingers this time, thinking, That’s wrong. You did it wrong.

  Then Davy was on his feet, staggering away from her.