As he was about to leave, they told him to bow his head. They raised their hands over him and gave him a blessing as old as time. His eyes stung and the hardness at his throat got bigger, so Bernard was a fine mess by the time he went to say good-bye to his mother.
When he got home, most of Mama’s mind was deep in opium dreams. It’s doubtful Caroline Levy understood what was going on as he packed up a sack of clothes and his daddy’s penknife, the pearl-and-ebony-handled artifact that was the whole of his legacy. She had trouble keeping her eyes open when he gave her his prepared speech about being a man and the river calling to him. All she said was, Well, you’re one of ’em, ain’t you, boy. Then her eyes closed again.
He could not rouse her a second time. Wanting some part of her to take with him—she was still his mama after all—he grabbed a hank of hair and sawed it off using his daddy’s penknife. He twisted it, wound the twist tight around his palm to make a compact ring he stuck in his pocket, leaving his hand there, touching it, while he bent over to kiss her forehead and left her forever.
It was late in the year 1918. The war was over. The influenza epidemic was winding down. Both had done their damage. White men’s jobs went begging often enough. Bernard took his granddaddy’s advice and spent a few days wandering the levee, observing things. He noted which riverboats abused their workers, both black and white, which beat the Negroes only, which crews looked half-starved to death, which were manned by thugs with cold, darting eyes. He studied barges that carried freight, noting what kind, and ferries that carried people to and fro. He studied the destinations of all of them. Like his daddy and granddaddy before him, what attracted him were pleasure boats full of dandies calling to serving boys on the dock by waving straw hats in the air. They smoked cigarillos, their free arms draped the waists of blonde and redheaded women, who leaned over the rails and behaved like Mama on her worst days. Minstrels serenaded them from the docks, and they rained silver coin upon them. There must be piles of money on those boats, Bernard thought, and dozens of ways for me to get my hands on some.
Luck was with him. One of the biggest paddleboats on the river, Delilah’s Dream, had a ship’s doctor looking for an assistant. The doctor took one look at Bernard Levy wandering the levee and smiled the way most folk did. Then he wondered about that sweet assembly of button eyes, flared nose, and curlicue mouth so fiercely focused in the center of a wide, round face. Although he had the stature of a child, he looked strangely adult in posture and gesture. The doctor had the boy brought to him so he might study such a curious package. He gave Bernard a dollar and examined him from head to toe, measuring his skull, his limbs, the breadth of his chest, and even that of his behind until he was satisfied that this was no genetic abnormality but a normal thirteen-year-old lad. He examined his intellect next to see if impairment accompanied an odd physiology. Finding Bernard with all his senses intact and quick witted, he offered him the medical assistant job on a whim, thinking even a man in extremis would be cheered by the sight of him. He could produce him at his elbow whenever he had bad news to tell.
And so Bernard’s first career, in which he learned a great deal useful in all the others, began. For nearly three years, he followed Dr. Grayson around, carrying instruments, medicines, slop buckets, and towels. After the first three months, he could clean up blood and guts without getting sick to his stomach, steel himself against the stench of pus, and stitch a knife wound as well as the doctor himself. He witnessed the exposure, pulling, and scraping of female parts he’d never known existed. Once, the doctor allowed him to extract a child’s tooth. He learned about people. He learned that rough men felt fear, that women could bear pain, that a body could watch moonbeams dance on the river and go mad from the sight. He watched the gamblers and con men ply their trades to learn where a man was weak, where strong, when pushing him worked wonders, and when pushing him went too far. He fell in love with one bad woman, then another until he swore off any woman he did not buy, as buying them seemed more honest and less trouble. He came to know more cities and towns than he could fairly distinguish other than by their climate or the goods sold from their docks. He learned that nature was more unpredictable than all the bad women he had known put together.
The doctor was good to him. He gave him time off, room, board, and a decent wage. Considering the hardships and barbarities Bernard witnessed every day on the river, these were no small boons. He slept in the antechamber of Dr. Grayson’s suite aboard the Delilah’s Dream. It was a cozy spot, one he made his own. He had a straw mattress, fine cotton sheets, and a goose-down pillow set into an alcove originally designed for the storage of muddy boots and such. That left enough floor space for a wardrobe and one of the doctor’s cast-off easy chairs with a brick under its broken foot to keep it level. When everything was quiet, he liked to nestle in the chair and read old magazines he found abandoned on deck or study the pictures in the doctor’s medical books. After two years in service, Bernard experienced a growth spurt, and the alcove became too small for sleep. Accordingly, he converted that space to a shelf for reading materials along with a row of cigar boxes, in which he stored his collection of sentimental treasures, mostly postcards and ladies’ hair ribbons. He slept in the chair.
One Saturday night during a full moon, the doctor roused him with a hand on his shoulder. Hurry, boy, he said. Saturday-night special. This was their code for yet another knife fight in the dance hall where ragtime swelled a man’s blood until it begged for release at the edge of a blade. When they got there, a cut-up man lay crumpled in a pool of blood, as usual, and a woman was bent over him weeping, as usual. The doctor raised the woman up by her elbows and set her aside, as usual. Across the room, a drunk, swearing revenge on the weeping woman, swayed on unsteady feet, as usual. Bernard placed the surgical kit next to the wounded man and opened it, as usual. Then something unexpected happened.
There was a shot from a handgun, then a sharp clatter as the drunk dropped his weapon when he saw whom he’d shot instead of the harlot he’d aimed for. Dr. Grayson fell to his knees clutching his middle and slumped over the man with the knife wound. Bernard shrieked and pulled the doctor off the first victim. Dr. Grayson was gut shot, bleeding a river, his eyes rolling up in his head. The man previously underneath him skittled away on his heels to the far corner of the room, screaming more about the doctor’s blood mingling with his than his own injury. As there was no one else to do the job, Bernard grabbed a scalpel from the kit he’d opened. Saying a prayer for guidance, his first heartfelt prayer since Mama declared his daddy disappeared, he took that scalpel and dug around inside the doc’s gizzard looking for the bullet. Clink, clink, he heard above the wails of the woman and the scramble of the men trying to subdue the murderin’ drunk. Clink, clink as metal hit metal, and he’d found his mark. Slowly, slowly, holding his breath, he drew the blade out of the wound, holding the bullet against it with slight pressure against the belly wall, but that was the worst thing he could have done. He should have used the compressor forceps, tied up the bleeders then cuddled up to the bullet with the forceps’ smooth, soft sides. Because he didn’t, all hell broke loose in the form of a slit intestinal artery. Blood spurted up four inches high at least, a gush that bathed Bernard in his mentor’s life. Within seconds, no matter how much pressure he applied with his hands, Dr. Grayson bled out and died.
It was the worst moment of his young life. Bernard was inconsolable. He’d acted rashly. He should have just tried to stem the bleeding until someone got the ship’s cook. Even that butcher would have been more adept at extracting a bullet. At least the cook knew where the major blood vessels were of most beasts, including a man’s. Instead, he’d murdered Dr. Grayson as surely as the shooter. The captain was summoned. He ordered the crew to haul off the slobbering inebriate and lock him up until midday when they’d reach the next town. Bernard tried to follow, weeping, holding his bloody hands out in front of himself, begging for the cuffs and imprisonment for this evil he had done, his slaying of
the one man in the world who’d been a prince, yes, a prince to a poor, fatherless river rat unworthy of every act of kindness received from those pale, lifeless hands.
Everyone ignored him. A pleasure ship without a doctor was as serious a problem as a pleasure ship without a bartender. The captain and his mates busied themselves on the wireless to see whom they might line up at nearby ports of call. No one noticed nor cared when, wracked with guilt, Bernard disembarked along with the murderer and the corpse the next high noon. He took with him the doctor’s anatomy book as a keepsake, the wages he’d saved, and his old sack stuffed with clothes, a bar of soap, his daddy’s penknife, the lock of his mama’s hair, and his shaving razor, abandoning his treasures for all time. He did not know where he was going. He wandered. He wandered over dry land, he wandered through swamp. He crisscrossed the wild river on makeshift rafts. He wandered past shantytowns alongside the railroad tracks. He slept out in the open along the ribs of Highway 61. Whenever he’d a choice, he took the most difficult path, as his passage was a penance, a grieving, and he understood such should be arduous. When his purse went dry, he hired himself out as a layer of brick, a field hand, a scavenger of refuse, a hauler of wood and coal, a grave digger, any kind of hard and dirty labor he came across. From all that hardship, he grew wizened, lost much of his hair, and looked aged beyond his years. And he found himself making his closest human relations with black folk, the people he most often labored beside.
Whenever he hit a town and he had enough pocket money to sleep indoors, the first thing he did was inquire where the black folk lived, and then he’d head there, looking for lodging. He found hiring a room in a Negro home was cheaper than any white boardinghouse in the town, especially those set up for transient workers by the plantations, the railroad, and the highway department. The food was usually more to his liking, collards and chicken parts rather than corned beef hash, and the Negroes had the inside dope on where there might be day labor, how fast a man might expect to be paid, and which foremen pocketed half a laborer’s pay.
When he drifted up by Saint Louis, he was directed to a settlement five miles off river to which he walked the better half of an afternoon in the hot sun. The first house he saw on the outskirts of that place was a sight better than the ordinary ramshackle, having both a front and a back porch with rockers and potted plants all around. He judged it must belong to a preacher or an undertaker. Out of respect, he went around back to knock on the screen door. Just as his balled fist was set to rap, his eyes adjusted to the light within and his fist froze, his breath stopped.
There, in the middle of a planked wood floor, was a great tin tub, and inside the great tin tub soaked a black woman extraordinarily long and lean of limb. Her legs bent at the knee and dangled outside the tub over the sides as did her arms so that both her hands and feet rested flat on the floor. Her back did not arch. Her breasts and stomach were submerged in the milky water. She had long black hair, it draped the floor, there seemed no end to it, and it was full of life. Its tendrils twisted and curled every which way like the brush of a tropical forest. He would not have been surprised if birds flew out of it singing. He’d never seen the like of that hair before, nor would he ever see it again, although years later, a lifetime later, he was reminded of that hair when he first saw Beadie Sassaport, and the reminder had more than a little to do with his attraction to her.
The woman’s face struck him as exquisite, even though all he could see of it was an assembly of shadowed planes and soft rounds. It was like something carved from marble and meant for worship. The cheekbones were long and deep, the nose broad but straight, the lips so full they looked as if a man could bite them to discover a drink of sweet nectar that never stopped flowing. Her eyes, if he’d seen them open, might have turned him to stone, but as it was he could only imagine their brilliance beneath closed lids fringed in thick, soft lash.
She seemed asleep. She did not move for a very long time, during which Bernard, entranced, studied her with no thoughts but those of marvel at the deep shiny color of her skin, the length of her sinewy thighs, the slender fingers and toes with their purplish nails, which led to thoughts of royalty. He imagined a crown on her head, in that hair, maybe one made of plaited river grass. As he pondered and marveled, his left foot fell asleep. It crumpled underneath him and he went clumsily down on one knee on the porch landing, making a helluva racket. The woman, who did not move a muscle, opened her mouth and in a voice that for Bernard was like the sound of heavenly cymbals ringing from on high to jangle every nerve he had left, said, Horace! Horace! That better be you!
Sitting as he was on the porch floor in a humiliating position, flat on his ass, cross-legged, rubbing his foot back to life, Bernard had an attack of humbleness. He spoke the truth when a quicker wit would have jumped up and hobbled as fast as he could back to the cover of trees lining the road.
No, m’am, it ain’t Horace.
There was a great sound of sloshing water as if a spring had burst forth in a desert. Bernard jerked his head, looked up, slack-jawed and pop-eyed. The goddess had risen from her bath in a rush. She’d been wearing a shift while bathing, which was often the custom in those days, but it was white and thin and clung to her flesh so that she looked nude, more naked than if she’d been undressed. He stared up at her graceful belly, at her round, high breasts. His eyes moved up, up, up—she was as tall as her long limbs suggested with a long torso to match—until they rested on her face, which was now alert and livid. Her eyes, oh! those eyes! black and glinting with impossible light! She glared at him with a fury he could barely comprehend, such was the heat in those eyes, and he thought his very soul would melt in the fire of her fierce beauty.
It happened so fast, he didn’t see it coming. In a heartbeat, she burst through the door and had her hands around his neck, squeezing, squeezing, with the rage in her eyes unabated. Her knees were in his ribs, keeping him down, pushing the air up from his chest at the same time her hands at his throat kept the air from leaving him. A war went on inside his lungs. At first, he fought, but she was so much larger than he, the pressure was too great. It was a losing battle. He burned, every fiber of his chest was enflamed. He went faint, he ceased to fight, his vision went dark, his body began to float in the air, so that he felt a willing victim offered to an unimaginable deity, zealous and primitive, when a voice, faint but insistent, came to his ears.
Aurora! Aurora Mae! Stop! Stop! That is a white man you’re killin’! You will bring down hell upon us! Stop! Stop!
And the torture ceased.
When he finished gasping and could breathe normally again, sight was the first sense that came back to him. Bernard’s eyes fluttered, struggled to focus, and what he could see was a young black man with a head of hair as wild and untamed as the goddess Aurora Mae’s. He leaned over him with a glass of water and a frantic expression on his perfectly plain, unremarkable features. He was dressed as they all were in summer, in overalls, shirtless, barefoot. Apart from the worry on his face, everything about him, from his medium build, to his brown eyes, his broad African nose and full lips, was normal, everyday, a fact oddly comforting to a man nearly choked to death by a giantess. He reached out a trembling hand and his savior pulled him up. With an arm around his waist, Horace guided Bernard to a chair in the kitchen, one close to the tin tub, close enough so that Bernard could smell the sweet scent of store-bought soap and hear its little bubbles burst as when one has come close to death and lives, the senses return with mythic sharpness. When his breath regularized, he spoke in a voice made ragged from strangulation.
I’m very sorry—Horace, is it?
The man’s brow creased in apparent suspicion. His face went dead still, the worry masked by something darker. He slowly shook his head up and down twice.
I’m very sorry, then, Horace. I come back ’round here to see if you got a room to let or know anybody who does as I am passing through and need both work and lodging. I did not mean to disturb your wife. I was not intend
ing to spy on her, but confronted as I was by the astonishing vista of her, I could not help but be hypnotized. I do hope you both forgive me.
Suspicion was now writ more distinctly upon his savior’s features. His eyes were narrow with it. His head tilted to the side with the chin pointed out. The mouth was a grim, puckered line. Verbose apologies after nearly being strangled to death by a black woman was the last thing he expected out of a white man’s mouth. He waited for the sucker punch that invariably followed sly remarks from these people.
My sister, he said.
Miss Aurora Mae is your sister?
Yessir. She is.
Now this was something Bernard thought hugely funny, and he laughed outright, startling Horace into straightening up and backing off. Forgive me again, he said. It’s just that, well, you and I, we’re no more’n bugs next to her, are we? And yet you are blood related? Oh dear, oh dear.
And he laughed and laughed as much from exhaustion as from relief that he was alive. Even more, he laughed because he acknowledged to himself happily—it was pointless to deny it—that he was immediately, hopelessly, scandalously, outrageously, probably sinfully in love with Aurora Mae, and she was not married or at least was not married to the man who’d saved his life. For his part, Horace stopped looking suspicious and erupted into guffaws himself out of relief, because he’d decided this strange, funny-looking white man was no kind of threat to him and his but simply, clearly a fool.
He had a room for rent, too. The one off the kitchen had been slave quarters back when white folk owned the house. It seemed fitting that a redneck, beggar idiot might reside there now that the house had come down to him and his sister. Their grandmama, Sybil, had been the original owner’s slave and had been much abused in that room, first by her master and then by her master’s son. When the war came, the two men went off with a Confederate regiment to die at Pea Ridge under General Price. The lady of the house took ill around the same time with the yellow fever. She was as strong as she was mean and lasted longer than other victims until finally, she died in extreme pain. Sybil nursed her to the end in that same room off the kitchen, because it was the closest to boiling water and such. Now death and suffering have a way of gentling people, allowing them to give voice to their guilt, which is what won Sybil freedom even before Emancipation.
One More River Page 10