All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  Don’t let him get his rifle, she thought, but he didn’t seem to grasp what had happened or even consider the weapon. She stood and followed him several steps. She had that strange sensation of watching herself again—as though all of this wasn’t her doing; it was a silhouette woman cast by firelight against a wall.

  Davy had begun to sputter and cough, bleeding through the seams of his fingers. He bent to spit blood from his mouth. She stepped up to cut at him again, but then a whistling noise came from his throat and the sound of it stopped her cold.

  You could tell it shocked him as well. He pulled his hands from his neck and looked at them. The dark slit she’d carved into his windpipe wheezed. A bubble formed over it, blew big and popped. Davy’s panicked eyes widened and he released a terrible scream.

  Or tried to. That whistling noise came from the gash, much louder now, and then something she’d never have imagined: he took off running.

  Then here she was chasing after him, running out through the cedars, the knife still in hand.

  He was moving very fast for an injured thing. She could just see him up ahead, dodging limbs, a shadowed form jerking through the trees.

  Don’t let him go. Do not let him go. You can see him by the light of the moon. Bright, old moon. If it were darker you might not make him out, but it isn’t darker. I am darker, dark as the ring outside the nimbus—that is the word, nimbus—your heart is cold as the moon and black as the sky around it.

  When she caught up with him, he was sitting beneath the spread of a live oak, holding his throat in both hands as if he’d strangle himself, wheezing. He looked up and saw her and she knew he’d have run again if he’d been able. His life was leaking out of him and he seemed to understand that he would die.

  He began to shake his head.

  “Don’t,” he said, “please don’t.” His voice sounded very strange.

  She came up and squatted a dozen feet away. Her ears were stinging from the cold.

  “Why’d you do that?” he said, and his voice was all hurt and outrage, as if she’d betrayed him horribly.

  She studied him a few moments. Then she said, “You shouldn’t have taken up with those men, Davy. They killed my Sam.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody,” he said. He might have yelled it if he’d had the strength. His voice was beginning to crack. He spoke in a whisper.

  “I’m not going to be a slave again. What would make you think you can just cart me off this way?”

  He began to tremble. He was terrified of her. She’d never done this to anyone, and though she took no pleasure in it, there was a puffed-up feeling in her breast. She felt herself puffed up very high.

  He said, “I’m going to die, ain’t I?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “My mama won’t even know what happened to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. And, in a way, she was. There just wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  “It hurts to talk,” he told her.

  “Maybe you should be quiet,” she said.

  Then he said, “You’re going to cut me again.”

  “I don’t need to,” she said.

  She watched him think about that. He began to cry. After a few minutes he said, “I’m scared.”

  “Are you?”

  He nodded. “I was raised in the church. I kindly got away from that when I left home. I always thought I’d take up with it again, but I never got the opportunity. You think the Lord’s liable to put me in hell over it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what He’s liable to do. There’s some I’d like to see Him put in Hell, but I don’t feel that way about you, Davy. I’m confident none of this turned out like you might’ve thought it would, but it hasn’t turned out for me either.”

  He sat there weeping softly. He said, “I never for one minute thought you’d stab me like that.”

  “That’s how I was able to,” she said.

  “It was almost like we were friends,” he said, and the outrage was back in his voice, the disbelief.

  “Almost,” she said.

  He sat with that a moment.

  She said, “Are you sorry you took up with those men?”

  “I’m sorry as I can be. I never wanted to be a part of no killing.”

  “I believe that, Davy.”

  They sat for a time. He was pressing around on his throat.

  He said, “If I keep my finger like this, it doesn’t make that sound.”

  “Then keep your finger there.”

  “Maybe I won’t die after all?” he said, but it wasn’t really a question, and she could tell he knew the answer.

  Then he said, “Can you sing?”

  “I haven’t sung since I was a little girl,” she said.

  “Would you sing a hymn?”

  “I don’t know any, Davy. Do you want me to sing to you?”

  “Mama used to sing hymns to me all the time. I keep trying to get a church feeling to where I can pray, but I can’t do it. If you’d sing to me, maybe it’d be better.”

  She wondered what kind of woman slashed a man’s throat and then sang songs to him. But then, a song formed on her lips. She hadn’t thought of it in years and she was surprised to find she still knew the words. The first verse went:

  The Spirit of God like a fire is burning.

  The latter-day glory begins to come forth;

  The visions and blessings of old are returning,

  And angels are coming to visit the earth.

  When she was done, she saw Davy was sitting there, eyes closed, mumbling his lips. She sat quietly until he finished.

  Then he opened his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome, Davy.”

  He leaned his head back against the trunk of the tree and watched her a few moments.

  He said, “How much longer will it take?”

  * * *

  It took the rest of the night. He bled slow, but he bled steady. By dawn he was ashen and an hour later he was blue. She could see how she’d cut him now, a gash across his Adam’s apple, no marks on the veins at either side of his neck. By good daylight, his pupils were the size of beetles, the round black beetles you see in the crevices of things.

  She walked up and squatted there in front of him, then reached out, intending to brush his eyelids shut. But as soon as the tips of her fingers touched his brow, her hand recoiled. The smell of feces was strong and she realized he’d messed himself.

  Yes, she thought. You may’ve been your mama’s darling. But you are not mine.

  She left his dead eyes staring at the sunrise and found her way back to the camp they’d made the previous evening. The horse was tied to a picket line. When she entered the clearing, the animal raised its head and looked at her.

  She thought, I have a knife, a rifle, and a mount as well.

  She was pilfering through the boy’s belongings, deciding what to take, what to leave behind, when she stopped and glanced over at the gelding.

  You can’t just go riding down the road. That horse will get you caught. And you’ll never be able to hide with it.

  The rifle was a problem too. She knew how to fire it, but she wasn’t sure she remembered how to load and fire again. Did the ball go in first or was it the powder?

  She stood there holding it, trying to judge its weight. Twelve or thirteen pounds.

  And what’s it going to be like carrying it day in and out? Not just the gun, but the horn and pouch of lead?

  She ended up leaving everything but the knife, a small slab of bacon, and a half-loaf of stale bread, carrying the food in the shot pouch and starting out across the countryside, the road somewhere north of her, off to her right. By dark she’d lost track of it altogether and focused only on moving west.


  Which didn’t sound so difficult, but it was incredibly so. Some days, she’d emerge from the pine trees to discover she’d been travelling south or southeast even, standing at the edge of the woods with the sun sinking toward the horizon, thinking, This can’t be right. It should be over there.

  She made the bread and bacon last the better part of a week—she thought it was a week; it was hard to keep track—and once it was gone, began to forage. She was very lucky that it was springtime: there were morels on the southern slopes of hillsides or clustered around dying trees. But there certainly wasn’t much else. She thought she could find crawdads in the little streams she’d been stumbling on and she wished now she’d saved a few pieces of pork for bait.

  One evening, scrambling along the bank of some nameless creek, searching for the little mudbugs, an image rose up like a painting on the inner wall of her skull: Davy sitting beneath that tree with both hands around his throat, blood pumping through his fingers, staring at her with his astonished eyes. It hardly even seemed like something she’d caused, had to be some other Cecelia who’d drawn the blade across the poor boy’s throat.

  Poor boy? You can’t kill and pity him too.

  And why not? Maybe that’s how it’s done.

  She went over and squatted beside a pool where the creek flowed past, quiet as a thief. She glanced down and saw a crawfish in the water not a foot away and before she even had time to consider it, her hand had snatched it up. She pinched its head between her fingers and tore the tail away with her teeth, sharp legs wriggling against her tongue. It was like eating a slick, wet grasshopper. She crunched it down, then waddled over to where the water went over a short falls and scooped palmfuls of it to her mouth, rising out bits of flesh and shell.

  She crouched around the pool till dark, seizing crawdads. Wasn’t as easy as the first one had been. Sometimes she’d barely reach for one before they’d go jetting backward and she’d be left with her palm hovering above the clouded water. She learned to use both hands—one to grab the critters, the other as a kind of trap—and by nightfall she’d caught and eaten six of them and her belly was rumbling. She slept fitfully that night, worried she’d be sick and vomit, but she managed to keep it all down. When dawn came, she opened her eyes and stared at the branches overhead.

  You can’t live off crawdads forever. Mudbugs and mushrooms. Avoiding these plantations where slaves eat their corn and fatback.

  She never thought she’d come to envy slaves their meager helpings, but she’d never been so hungry. Or if she had been, she couldn’t recall it now.

  Then something strange occurred to her. The idea was so sharp, a thrill of terror travelled up her spine and she knew in that instant precisely how she might feed herself and reach Bastrop in the bargain. The only problem was the problem of nerves: she didn’t doubt it would work, but what would be left of her to confront Lammons at the journey’s end?

  What’s left of me now? I have killed a boy.

  She was on the verge of crying, but she couldn’t afford the effort of it, and she said, “I don’t know where you went, but I won’t let you go from me. You hear? It’s your son I’m trying to get to; he belongs to you as well. Throw your shadow over me. You had to kill in your life too, and now, so have I. And will again.”

  She stopped and lay there. She felt a swell of love enter her heart, faint, at first, and then stronger. She’d reached out to Sam in a kind of despair, but now she could feel him quite keenly.

  She sat up and got to her feet. The sky in the east was the color of skin. She turned and started to walk.

  DUNCAN LAMMONS

  —TEXAS, 1847—

  Sundays, I’d get Bob dressed and walk him through the cedar trees to see Noah and his family. The Smithwicks had two little girls—the youngest, Robert’s age—and these visits to their home were a great boon for me: though I had great affection for the lad, his energy was so different from mine that come evening each day, I’d be fagged completely out.

  Thurza could tell what a troublous time I was having and on our Sunday visits she always made certain to make over Bob and give him attention. Robert soaked in every drop; you could see how badly he missed motherly affection. Lord knows what a poor surrogate I was.

  Whenever we came on the Smithwick cabin and Noah’s dogs began barking to herald our arrival, Thurza would walk out onto the porch and standing awaiting us.

  No matter what mood Bob was in—whether he’d been fussy or fractious that morning—the sight of that dear woman would set him smiling. He’d sprint across the yard and scramble up the steps to her.

  “There he is!” Thurza would say. “There’s my little dumpling,” by which time she’d already have him in her arms or wetting the hem of her dress and scrubbing soil from his cheeks.

  “Do you ever clean him?” she’d ask me.

  “It’s a long defeat,” I’d tell her. “The dirt’s winning.”

  He’d tail her around long as she let him. Being in the presence of a woman did him considerable good.

  One afternoon, I was sitting with Noah on the porch there, drinking coffee and discussing the latest rumors of General Scott’s campaign down in Mexico or Fremont’s out in California while the children chased each other round the yard, involved in some intricate game only they knew the rules of.

  Noah was telling me of Stephen Kearny and the Battle of Rio San Gabriel when I realized the youngsters had gone quiet. I looked over and saw Bob and Nanna, Noah’s youngest, were fussing at each other, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Bob was holding a little ragdoll, Nanna a horse that I’d carved. Bob had the strangest look on his face. He reached for the horse, but Nanna jerked it away. He drew a deep breath and his cheeks went red. He looked so angry he would burst.

  And then he did, releasing a loud, piercing wail that brought me to my feet. I set my coffee on the chair I’d risen from and started to make my way down the steps to fetch him. Thurza reached out and took hold of my shirt.

  “Wait a minute, Mister Lammons.”

  I didn’t see what I was waiting for. The Lord alone knew what He was doing when He put that tortured note in a child’s shriek.

  But Thurza had seen children scrimmage a time or two and as I stood there, trying to figure out how I’d extricate myself from her grip without giving offense, the elder Smithwick girl—Rachel—walked over, took the doll from Robert and handed it to Nanna. And that child, sensing a negotiation was under way, turned loose of the horse and allowed Rachel to pass it to Robert.

  Well, this was a marvelous piece of diplomacy and no mistake about it. Robert went just as quiet as a rabbit. He and Nanna eyed each other a few moments, mumbled back and forth a few more. A minute later, they were running around the yard again, laughing with delight, the matter of the wooden horse and ragdoll laid aside.

  I took up my coffee and sat back down, looking at Thurza like she was some wizard.

  She just smiled at me.

  “It is better,” she said, “to let them work through it. If you settle matters for them, they will never learn.”

  I shook my head and chuckled. I nodded toward Rachel.

  “Reckon we could sent her down to Mexico City? I’m sure General Scott and Santa Anna have need of such a politician.”

  CECELIA

  —TEXAS, 1847—

  That spring, a rumor traveled among the slaves of Houston County. They said a banshee had come to agonize the pine trees beyond the fields, some vengeful spirit that fed on shoats and stole grain from the corncribs. A haint of the timberlands. A terrible wraith.

  Field hands would only speak of her in whispers:

  These pigs are a trick on us. Fact is, she lives off the blood of children, slips her tooth inside their throat.

  It ain’t just them woods she stays in, neither—her home is underneath the ground. She tunnels through it like a mole.

&n
bsp; She’s no spook at all, but an old, black witch. The blood she’s knowed to drink turns her into dogs. You think it’s dirt she lives in? She might be any mutt amongst us, that mangy bitch right there.

  Hunger starves the sinews but feeds folks’ imaginations. When Cecelia first heard these stories, she was too famished to grasp they were about her.

  She’d been moving overland by day, stealing through the piney woods, searching for morels among the rotten stumps. Then slipping onto plantations in the eventide and down to the slave quarters, hoping for a handful of cornmeal and a dry place to sleep.

  This never would’ve worked in autumn at picking time when hands labored well past dark, toting their baskets up to the steelyard where overseers would weigh and mark down each man’s load in his ledger. But in the spring when slaves stooped to nestle cotton seeds inside the earth, the overseers only took headcount in the morning, calling the names of every man and woman and assigning each to a captain. And as no one expected to have more slaves at the end of the day than he had at dawn, she was able to use their math against them.

  The first time she crept onto one of these plantations she was so frightful her teeth began to chatter. She sat in the tall pines at the edge of the field, watching as hands worked the mud with their hoes. It’d rained all morning and the laborers were so spattered with muck they looked like creatures made of soil.

  Tonight, she thought. Tonight, I will try.

  But when the hands slung their hoes on their shoulders and began marching up to their quarters, she couldn’t even stand. The terror was like smoke inside her veins and she stayed right where she was.

  She was back in the same spot the next evening. The sky was clear and the stars had begun to burn. She watched the slaves as one by one they shouldered their hoes and left the fields, travelling up along the earthen dike. She got to her feet, but the moment she did, her bowels churned, and she staggered a few steps before squatting to hike her dress, the fear rushing out of her hot and foul.