The Hush

by John Hart

  For long hours the despair of so many drove her mad with pain. It was too much, like stone breaking. Cree tried to crawl away, but Aina’s mind was filled with madness, too. Suffering and want and suicidal thoughts—she was the drain that drank it down, a flower in the rain. She had nowhere to hide, and that made it hard for Cree, too. She’d never known awareness like this: the power of it and the weight. In despair, she clawed into the recesses of Aina’s mind, looking for the corners and quiet eddies. No such place existed, so Cree sought the stillness of memory, forging deeper and down until she found the darkness of a cave and firelight and other nights. She saw little, and felt less. She was a child afraid, skin against a naked breast; but there was love there, and peace, a gentle voice and the promise of morning. Cree knew in the way of dreams that it was Aina’s childhood before—that she would walk soon, and leave the cavern and grow strong on the mountain. Cree felt all of that, and wanted to stay buried, to flow from one memory to the next and never return to the ship where people called out for water and family and lost gods.

  But the dream was deep, and the ship forever. It plowed through waves; shuddered as a double crest lifted it high, stalled it for a moment, then dropped it like a building down the side of a mountain. Cree felt the crush of bodies, the slide of skin and chains and sludge. People cried out, and she knew their thirst and loss, the fear of drowning with an iron collar on her neck. The ship rose again and fell, and she lost herself in the bitter sway. She was a queen, a frightened slave; she was Aina, entire.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Aina”

  1853

  Death came on a Sunday, but it was not the death people expected. It should have been the Master’s wife—that’s what Aina heard—that his wife was eaten up with a fever like none had ever seen. Of course, the whole world was burning. Scorched pastures. Dead cattle. Aina knew only a few slaves, but they worried at the sick children and failed crops, and what it meant for the moon to rise red. There was talk, too, of fighting in town, of brawls and blame and a white man bullet-holed in the Main Street dirt. It was the heat that did it, and every day was worse than the last. The sun rose red, and the moon followed. Even the river felt like blood. That was Aina’s thought as they carried the Master’s wife down the bank and tried to drown the fever that was killing her.

  It wouldn’t work, she knew, not that kind of fever and not as weak as the white woman was. Aina had watched them leave the house, and was in the river before them, a slip of a girl as black as night and naked behind a river birch the size of her waist. She wanted to see if white people died the same as slaves, and from where she hid, it looked like the answer was yes.

  “Get her hair wet! Hold her head! Get the rest of her down deep.”

  That was John Merrimon, though Aina had never seen him up close. She spent her days chained to a wall or locked in a room. She was too wild to be trusted, too unpredictable and violent and African. Three weeks had passed since she’d been bought off the docks of Charles Towne, but she’d never broken, not once. She stretched her lips if they got close; she fought and cursed, and felt the rising wildness that made the other slaves look away. They were scared of her—they wouldn’t admit it, but they were. The women said her eyes shone yellow in the dark. The men spoke of how she bared her teeth and made animal noises deep in her throat. Of course they came for her just the same: the yellow-haired foreman and the livery boy and the hardhanded slave, still filthy from the fields. They came because she was small and well shaped, and because she never spoke of what happened when the door swung in on leather hinges. She was weak in this place, so she hadn’t killed them yet. But she knew their names, just the same. She knew their names and what they ate and where they slept.

  Settling deeper, Aina glided from one birch to the next. She knew some of the words they spoke, but not all of them, knew fever and dying and doctor. But no doctor could cure John Merrimon’s wife. It would take power to do that, and there was no power in the river beyond Aina’s. Curious, though, she watched the Master and his sister, the field hands, and a house slave named Isaac. She watched Isaac most intently because he was smarter than all the other slaves put together. He knew things, she thought, white-man things like marks on paper and guns and the great man they worshipped in the sky. It was because of him that Aina stayed so low in the water. Everyone else paid attention to the dying woman, but not Isaac. He watched the bank and the water; his eyes touched many things, but not her. She knew the night, and the night loved her for it. It hid her when she wept, held her as she climbed the tallest trees to stare at the same moon she’d known before the betrayal and the chains and the ship that stank of death and shit and vomit. But Aina would not be a slave for long. She was weak in this place, but still her mother’s child.

  Not this person they thought her to be.

  Not this slave.

  Turning her attention to John Merrimon, she watched him weep, and thought it weak in a man who owned other men. He had many things—this Master—but his woman would die. Aina heard the lungs rattle; felt the heat so deep, no river could touch it. She looked at the hump of the white woman’s stomach, and knew the baby would come soon if it could, but not soon enough to live. Aina could save them both if she chose, but the black-haired man owned her, and because of that, she hated his world and all things in it.

  But she’d learned his secret, there in the river.

  The white man was human after all.

  She could use that.

  * * *

  The house slave came for her three hours later. She heard his step in the dirt beyond the door, and knew the smell of him, the rhythm of his breath. He hesitated, then opened the door and loomed above the pallet where she lay. She saw the large head, the giant shoulders. He shook the chain that bound her ankle to an iron ring. “You were at the river.”

  He spoke a language she knew, one of the lesser tribes from narrow valleys beyond the great mountain.

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “I’m not as blind as most.”

  “There is this chain,” she said.

  “Yes, but I know what you are.”

  “Then you should be running afraid or begging for your life. This will end badly for you and the man you call Master.”

  “John is not as bad as some.”

  “He owns children.”

  “Yet you are no child.”

  She smiled in the dimness, and knew he could see it. “Does your Master see so clearly as you?”

  “He is little more than a child himself. His father just died. He does what the foreman says.”

  “The foreman.” She spit that word, too, and thought the house slave understood the reason. “Are you here for this?” She spread her legs—a rattle of chain. “Or are you wise enough to know the danger?”

  He nodded at the last question.

  “Tell me why,” she said.

  “Because I know what you are.”

  “Say it, then.” He swallowed hard, and she turned her face to show the scars put there by her mother’s own hand. “Say it,” she said, and he did: a word in her language, the one true tongue.

  It meant “priestess,” “prophet,” “dark queen.”

  * * *

  Minutes later, the house slave led Aina through brittle grass and to the grand, white house. It was like houses she’d seen on the roads of Charles Towne, and reminded her of the ship that carried her across the ocean. Six months ago, she’d not known that men could build such things. Men were for fighting and hunting and fucking. But the white men built splendid things, and crossed oceans. They worshipped a gentle god, yet were as cruel as children. It was to understand this contradiction that she mounted the broad steps and passed through tall doors. Inside was a space as vast as any cavern in the great mountains of home. She saw colors and fabrics, metals that gleamed, and wood as dark and smooth as a baby’s skin.

  Stepping inside, she kept her head high, ignoring the women who were not women at all, but shadows
of women that cooked and cleaned and carried the white man’s shit. They risked glances at Aina’s face, then looked away from the scars cut like spirals in her cheeks. Ignoring them, Aina studied a square of silver glass that hung on the wall and showed her reflection as well as any pool she’d ever seen. It showed her as others saw her: the wild eyes and scars, a dirty girl in a scrap of cloth. They thought her young and ignorant and wild, but it wasn’t like that, and Isaac knew it, too. No one else wore scars like hers.

  Not by choice.

  Not if they wanted to live.

  “This way. Please.” He moved up a curving staircase, and she followed at her own pace. At a great door, he paused, and Aina saw the fear in his eyes. “Please,” he said. “I’m begging you.”

  When the door opened, Aina saw the dying woman in a wide bed, and by her side was John Merrimon holding a small, bright knife. He looked at Isaac, terrified. “She’s dying,” he said.

  Isaac pushed into the room, and Aina watched them argue. It started slowly, then grew louder. She understood few of the words, but knew enough to smile a little when Isaac said black magic. She’d heard the words from the mouths of other slaves, from field hands and cooks, from the old women who said the foreman couldn’t break Aina, and that the fear was in his eyes, too. They said she was driving him mad, that he raped her and choked her, and that she laughed in his face as he did it.

  They said the heat came with her.

  That it would leave when she was dead.

  John Merrimon was no different. He looked at her, appalled; but the hope was growing in his heart. She saw it when he looked at his wife, and the big slave spoke.

  The child can save her.…

  There will be a price.…

  She nodded because there was always a price. That was the way of things, woman or child, white man or black.

  The argument grew, and she thought it was about gods and the woman and right and wrong. Aina watched until she was bored, then crossed the room in silence. No one noticed when she moved, and that was part of her gift: cunning and deceit, suppleness and speed.

  They blinked and she was beside the bed.

  “I fix.”

  The white man stopped and stared because no slave off the boat should know his language so soon. But Aina was smarter than any man. “Baby die first,” she said. “Then woman. You pay, I fix.”

  “You can’t fix her. No one can.”

  But Aina felt a tingle in her palms, a gathering of threads. She touched the woman’s skin, and color returned. For an instant, the eyes opened.

  “John…”

  The white woman spoke, and the husband broke like a child. He dropped to his knees, the knife clattering beside the bed.

  “You pay, I fix.”

  Aina removed her touch, and the woman’s eyes rolled white.

  “No! Please! Bring her back!”

  Aina stooped for the knife, and no one stopped her. The white man cupped his hands, begging.

  “Please, God…”

  But his god was not listening, and neither was Aina. She walked to tall windows with a view over fields and forest. It was a new place, a new world.

  “I’ll pay you,” he said. “I’ll pay!”

  Aina took her time because she could ask for anything and he would give it to her. Money. Land. His life. When she spoke, it was to Isaac and in her own tongue. “I want freedom,” she said. “I want his mark on paper for all to see.”

  Isaac translated, and the man said, “Yes! Done!”

  “Land, too.”

  “Anything. Please.”

  Aina moved from the window, remorseless. She touched the white man’s face, the bend of his arm; she let him see the wildness in her heart, then offered up a smile and named her final price.

  The livery boy.

  The foreman.

  The hardhanded slave.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jack was in his cups again, not drunk really, but not entirely sober. He sat at the end of a dim bar at the back of a dim restaurant. The beer at his elbow was warm. The bartender, a soft man in his sixties, pointed at the glass. “Is that not working for you?”

  “I’m sorry?” Jack said. “What?”

  “It’s been sitting there for twenty minutes. I’m asking if you want something different.”

  “Maybe a whiskey,” Jack said.

  “What kind?”

  “Bourbon. I don’t care.”

  The bartender put a drink on the bar, and Jack nodded his thanks, sipping without really tasting. The phone was in his other hand. On it was a message from the senior partner. Jack played it for the fifth time.

  Mr. Cross, this is Michael Adkins. I’d like you to be in my office tomorrow morning at eight. It’s time for a serious discussion about your future at this firm.

  There was more, but Jack didn’t want to hear it. The first two lines said it all.

  He wasn’t showing up.

  Wasn’t billing.

  Draining the bourbon, he stood, fishing for his wallet. “What do I owe you?” The bartender gave him a number, and Jack dropped bills on the bar. He wobbled a bit going through the restaurant, but didn’t care about that, either.

  He had to talk to Johnny.

  Outside, the sun was down and a hot wind licked the concrete. Jack looked left and right, orienting himself. He’d never been to the restaurant before, though it was not far from the apartment or his office. After the trip to Charlotte, he’d parked the car and gone walking along one edge of downtown, and then another. He’d worn his feet raw before finding the restaurant and dropping half-dead onto the barstool. The first beer had gone fast, the second more slowly. The whiskey, he was thinking, might have been a mistake.

  “Eight o’clock.” He started walking. “Fabulous.”

  It was twelve blocks to his apartment, up nine and over three. People were out, the better restaurants booming. He thought again of eating, but had no appetite.

  How would he defend his behavior at the firm?

  Did he even care?

  The last question cut deep. He should care. God knows, he’d worked hard enough.

  At the bakery, he slipped into the narrow stairwell, and drew up sharply when he saw the girl on the landing by his door. She was slumped in a corner, twitching; her eyes rolled so far back in her skull, they showed entirely white. It took Jack a moment to recognize the girl from the apartment in Charlotte. He’d seen half her face, a single eye.

  What was she doing here?

  “Excuse me.” Jack leaned close, uncertain how best to wake her. “Um, miss.” He reached for her arm, but stopped short when her mouth opened. “Hello,” Jack said.

  The girl started screaming.

  * * *

  Cree didn’t know where she was or what was happening. The world was bloody and sharp, a jagged shard. She could feel the knife in her hand, the handle of it so slick and warm, it felt like something alive. There was a dark night and a dim hallway.

  The men were mutilated and screaming.

  She was screaming.

  “Stay away from me, stay away!”

  She drove herself into the corner.

  “It’s okay…”

  Cree scrambled to her feet. The hallway tilted and for a hard second she felt the fire on her skin, the pressure wave of moaning as a hundred slaves rocked foot to foot and kept their eyes on the dirt. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jack Cross. We met earlier. This is where I live.”

  Cree saw the stairwell, the plaster walls. “There was a knife.…”

  “No,” he said. “No knife.”

  Cree blinked twice. She could trust or not, leave or stay. She thought they wanted the same thing—she and the lawyer—but she’d never dreamed as Aina, not like this. She’d seen the hanging tree and held the knife, but she’d never known the reasons for it, not the history or raw emotion, not the god-awful gladness as men screamed and died. “Just a second, okay.” The dream wasn’t fading. It fluttered someplace deep, a li
ving thing that wanted her to know that Aina was real, that it wasn’t a story. Cree forced herself to straighten, to open her eyes and be the girl she’d always been, just the girl. She dug into her back pocket and pulled out shredded bits of paper. “I’m sorry your drawing got ruined.”

  “This is why you’re here?”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Perhaps you should come inside.” The lawyer studied her face for long seconds. “You’ll want to see this.” Inside, the apartment was all shadows and hollow places. “Just a minute. I’m sorry.” He fumbled for the switch, and paused. “Don’t be startled.”

  Cree blinked as light flooded the room. The drawings hung on walls and cabinets and doors. They stretched over tables and the sofa, spilled from stacks on the floor. She saw the glade, as if she were five again. She could hear her grandmother’s voice. You are never to go there, she’d said. No closer than this, not even when you are older.…

  “These were drawn a very long time ago.” He watched her move through the room and explained how he came to have them. “The artist drew them over a lifetime: ten in one year, a hundred the next. There’s a pattern,” he said. “I can’t explain it. Something about the way she used the charcoal. See how parts of some are so much darker and shinier. I’ve been studying this for days, and almost have it. It’s like a word on the tip of my tongue.”

  He went on like that for a while, but Cree tuned him out. The pictures stirred memories of every winter she’d known in the Hush: the short, cold days, how fires burned large and people scurried from one cabin to the next. She’d been too young to understand the fear she’d seen, but the drawings captured those feelings of stark aloneness.