Balm

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

  Later, after Herod slipped up beside him on the straw tick, after her two points of womanhood touched his chest and he responded, kissing her with a fever that would bring years of regret, after he hit her full in the face, hard enough that he was too ashamed to share the encounter with Annie, leaving the bloom on her cheek, after he’d forgotten whether he struck her with an open hand or a fist, after all of that, Horse would remember the meaning of her name.

  With more men than women on the farm, it was no easy thing to lay claim to one of the women. After the death of Herod’s father, Annie let it be known that she would not couple again. When Horse turned and caught her watching him work, he knew she was ready to go back on her word. It had taken twelve years after the man’s death, but when Horse boiled a pot of water to wash her hair, she threw her head back and let him rake his fingers through her tight curls. Annie and Herod lived alone, and because he shared a shack with four other men, Horse spent his evenings in Annie’s place, sending the girl out into the dirt yard. Over the course of his manhood, Horse had never impregnated a woman, so he did not believe he could. At first, he tried to claim Herod as his own, told the girl she could call him Pa, but her quiet watchfulness kept him ill at ease. He decided to step back. He felt safe enough in the knowledge that Annie’s love for him was steadfast, but after the night Herod attempted an abomination, he kept away. The girl was cursed, just like they said. He pressed down the memory: the feeling of sweet nestling against curled hairs. Herod told her mother Mr. Harrison hit her when she spilled hot milk on him, and Annie did not think once to cast an eye toward Horse.

  The day after Herod tried what she tried, and Horse did what he did, he lay with Annie, holding her tightly.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “We ain’t living right.”

  “What you talking ’bout?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I reckon Mister don’t care. George and Dinah done it. Henry and Jess. They all been declared by the preacher. I reckon he allow the same for us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You already live here. Make a heap of sense.”

  “Make more than sense.”

  She rubbed his neck. “Herod ought to be fine with it.”

  He pulled away. “Annie, that girl growing up. She need to find her own man. Plenty of ’em ’round here.”

  “She a child.”

  “No, she ain’t.”

  Annie lifted onto an elbow, a cloud of hair ringing her face. “The last fool try to break up me and Herod got run out of here.”

  “Fool? The last?”

  “She my blood.”

  Horse tried to slow his breathing so he could hear what was behind the words. Thirteen years she’d spent praying off the spirit that claimed the girl by name and he knew he would not penetrate it. If Herod told Annie what happened, he had no illusions whose side the mother would take.

  “I guess they is plenty room enough in this cabin for the three of us,” he said slowly.

  Annie took his hand in hers. “You know I wants to marry you, Horse. Ain’t no question.”

  Later that week, Horse knocked on the back door of the farmhouse, standing with his bare feet sunk in the mud while somebody went to fetch Mr. Harrison.

  “Who is that out there?” The old man’s vision had begun to fail him, and he refused to wear spectacles.

  “It’s Horse, sir. I come up here to ask you something.”

  “Well, spit it out. I know you ain’t sick.”

  “Naw, sir. I’m good and strong. Never felt better.” Horse and Annie had deliberately chosen to ask the old man before the hemp harvest, when the promise of work lay just around the bend, weeks ahead of the time the men were due to head out to the fields and cut it all down. “You know I can beat more shocks in a day than any hand down in that yard.”

  “Go on and spit out what you come up here to ask me. Hurry up while I’m still of a mind to listen.”

  Horse could not help but notice how disheveled the man’s clothes were, as if he’d just awakened from a nap.

  “The thing is, sir, me and Annie wants to get married.”

  Behind the old man, a sand-colored woman peeked out.

  “You and who?”

  The woman shouted over the old man’s shoulder. “The one fell and broke her toe couple years back.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with half a ear!”

  “Which?”

  “The one with the girl Herodias!”

  “Ah.”

  In earlier days, the old man had cast himself as preacher, gathering his small group of slaves on the edge of the orchard to talk about morality and sinning and God’s laws for them. He had never been much of a churchgoer himself, so he did not take up the Bible when he spoke. Instead, he used his own life as an example—how he treated them, for instance, or, later, how he remained faithful to his dead wife, refusing to remarry. In years past, when he’d taken a more vigorous interest in the workings of the farm, he’d voiced his pride over the young boy whose handle of a brake and hackle was well beyond his years, calling him Horse, and even then, like most things that came from his mouth, the name stuck. Everyone on the farm knew the old man’s son was a disappointment, a dandy, so when Harrison saw the slave child working and said he was “as strong as a horse,” it was clear he did so out of what he perceived to be a high compliment.

  “You realize that I cannot allow you and that woman to call yourselves married. I’mo tell you the same thing what I tell the others. You can do whatever you want in terms of ceremony down there. But as far as the law is concerned, you are not and never will be married. You unnerstand?”

  “Yas, sir.”

  “I do not control the laws of this great state. But if I did, I wouldn’t mind you all getting married every now and again, unnerstand? Now I have heard from others, honorable white men, that is, that slave marriages don’t do a farm any good. Old Betty who used to work in the house once told me she had enough masters between me and God and didn’t need another man to wipe up after.”

  “Yas, sir.”

  “But I believe in God’s commandments, and I have always preached morality to your kind. This here farm is mine, and I intend to maintain it the way I see fit. Now other things, the cost of wheat, for instance, don’t have nothing to do with me.” He placed a hand on the doorjamb. “I’m afraid with this country’s growing demand for grain, wheat might outgrow the cost of cotton, and if cotton fail, won’t be much need for hemp. Wheat is necessary, I suppose. We must have our bread. The Irish come running over here once there wasn’t no more potatoes. The thing one has got to do to be rich in this country is to outrun the poor. Get there first. These days, everybody is running to the cities. Not me. I prefer life on a farm, waking up to the sound of a rooster, unnerstand?”

  Horse glanced back down the hill where Annie waited, fighting an urge to step back. Mr. Harrison smelled of old things, like when the cobbler came around with discards for the slaves. Patched shoes that reeked of feet. Pants that smelled like ass.

  “Yas, sir.”

  “They won’t be satisfied until we are a nation of cities. God, how I hate the men that drive those blasphemed rails. What the hell do we need with all these railroads for? Men need to do like my daddy did, and his daddy before him. That’s the problem with that son of mine. That boy need to come on back, settle on this here land, and plow it!”

  “Yas, sir.”

  Harrison waved a hand and turned around. “I don’t give a damn what you do. Long as it don’t affect your work. This whole country is going to hell anyway. Maybe you and the old hag can save yourselves from damnation.”

  Horse waited outside for the housemaid to come back out. Once she’d delivered the old man to his chair, she would offer something. A pilfered gift like the bag of apples for George and Dinah or the cake for Henry and Jess. Marriages on the farm were a simple affair. A preacher usually came around, blessed the union.
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br />   She pressed a handkerchief into Horse’s hand. “It belonged to the missus. I reckon she don’t need it none now.”

  Horse took it, grateful she had given him something for Annie.

  THE RIGHTEOUS BUT GREEDY-EYED PREACHER would not come, and Horse had nothing to give. He tried to think of what he could make. Horse and Annie wanted to marry before the harvest, and he did not have much time. He thought of asking somebody else to bless them. Just being blessed by one of the other men might be enough in God’s eyes, but Annie insisted they needed an anointed preacher. George and Dinah had given the preacher George’s shoes. Henry and Jess had wrapped up cloth for him. Horse had nothing to spare, and he lost sleep over it. A week after asking the master for Annie’s hand, Horse made her stand, then turned her chair over in his hands and ran a palm across the back of it. It was a crude chair, its maker an unseasoned craftsman. But the seat was made of a good block of wood, and it did not show a single crack.

  “I make you another one,” he told her.

  Horse sat on the step of the cabin with the upturned chair between his legs. Everyone said he could scratch a piece of wood until it sang, a skill taught him by a white farmer who’d taken an interest in him as a boy. For six years, the man hired Horse every summer to help around his farm, and when the work was done for the day, Horse watched the man carve scrolls into the arms of chairs, feet into the legs of sofas. Back in the quarters, Horse sketched designs with sticks in the dirt, and when the woman who worked in the house saw a bird he’d drawn, she sneaked him paper and lead.

  Before the farmer died, he surprised Horse with a gift: his stash of tools. And Horse had kept the cherished instruments ever since. Now he carefully unrolled the leather pouch, exposing the rough assortment of gouges and chisels. The mallet propped against his leg, he took up his lead, sketching onto the underside of the chair, his hand moving quickly.

  He picked up a gouge, pushed it against the wood with both hands, and leaned into the end of its handle with his chest. The tool cut into the wood; he blew the flakes clear, chipping and cutting, changing tools and angles as he worked his way around the bottom of the seat.

  Annie found him humming in the dark.

  “What’s it gone be?” she asked.

  “You see,” he said.

  One night, while he sat carving, she scratched the itch out of his scalp with her fingernails, the ecstasy of her touch enough to make him drop the chair and take her right there. But they were running short on time and he could not stop working. A week later, when the chair was finished, he asked her to sit on it. She sat, and he lifted her skirt, wrapping his fingers around one of her ankles. He dipped a knife into a bowl of dirty water and scraped the skin from her heel. It fell in yellowed chips. He took care not to slice too deeply and cause a bleed in the softer spots. Once he could feel the new skin, he coaxed the soreness out with his thumbs.

  The preacher arrived the next day, and while Annie dressed for the ceremony, Horse presented the chair to him. The man took a quick look at it, muttered he did not need a rickety old chair that his mule was too old to carry. Horse offered to tie the chair to the back of the animal himself, promising that when he was finished the animal would not even know it was there.

  Horse turned the chair over. The preacher bent down, rested his palms on his knees. Pine tree points, peaks of hills cresting into a ridged sky, blades of grass reaching upward, a fawn in mid-step. The chair explained what Horse had known from the very beginning, that the greatest irony of their condition was the beauty of the country in which they toiled, and the heartbreak of their lives was the fogged lens through which they gazed upon God’s country. The wide-eyed surprise of the young deer, the tweet of nestlings, the banks of a river that curved into hills. This land around them was both the site of their darkness and the source of their light. The relief of casting a rod into the Dix, his feet resting on the river’s banks, had saved Horse’s life on more than one occasion, and beneath the seat of the chair, Horse had tried to capture that feeling and draw the earth as God intended, perfection before man’s spoiling, untainted by the sin of bondage. And he had risked that the preacher would not get it, could not see the Eden before him, for there were some, hopeless ones, who found no comfort in the satisfied nicker rising from a horse’s throat. The preacher stared, speechless, and Horse guessed that later on, the man would look upon it, turn the chair over and rest beside it, not in it, for the preacher’s wife had long been dead, and Horse knew he lived alone in a shack beside his master’s house. By God, this chair got the power to love me, Horse had thought when he finished, and with just one look into the preacher’s eye, Horse knew the man felt the same.

  Horse had hidden the carving on its underside, knowing it was a dangerous thing for a Negro to own something of value. When upright, people would see a plain chair, worn, nicked. Only the preacher would know to turn it over and set an eye upon its preciousness.

  He cleared his throat. “A few ears of corn would have sufficed.”

  “Corn still in the fields,” Horse said.

  “Tie it up.”

  That afternoon, the preacher pronounced them husband and wife. The bride wiped her eyes with the dead mistress’s handkerchief, her toothless grin like a child’s, and Horse tucked a dandelion in her hair as they stood in the cool of a hackberry’s shade. Herod did not speak, and it was not lost upon Horse that had she not tried that nighttime trick, he would have placed a flower in her hair, too.

  Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

  After the preacher pronounced them married, Horse and Annie walked hand in hand through the quarters, slaves calling out to them, shouting blessings and wishes for protection. In the cabin, a bowl of water and a freshly washed coverlet awaited. He held his bride, trying not to think of the next morning’s work. In the coming Resurrection, the trees would be greener, the sky bluer. A man of lesser faith might have thought this moment itself was heaven. But Horse, even with his un-Christian name, was thinking of an even better time. Lying with Annie led him to believe not in the existence of a heaven but in the possibility that he would get there.

  17

  IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THEIR MARRIAGE, HORSE revealed his loyalty to Annie piece by piece, and she thrived beneath the attention. She was his holy woman, his Hagar, his Sarah. And he was her Horse. She opened up and talked more, even kissed him on the cheek when he was not expecting it. By the time news of an attack on Fort Sumter reached the farm, Horse had settled comfortably into married life.

  A year later, it shocked them all when a bespectacled boy knocked on the door with the news that Mr. Harrison’s son had died in a battle down in Tennessee. Months earlier, when they learned the younger Harrison had volunteered with a Kentucky regiment, they feared for him, but none anticipated what happened next. It was April 1862, and the word Shiloh passed between them. They looked for news, hoping for abolition but more concerned with who would inherit all of them should the old man die. Once Harrison learned he would not even have a body to bury, he sat in his chair staring out at the stand of maples in his front yard. Nothing could rouse him. Every now and then the housemaid summoned Horse to the house for a repair and whispered what she had gleaned from the occasional newspaper that reached them. River transport was disrupted. So was cotton production. The war was affecting everything, and the demand for hemp would be considerably less that year.

  The men were cutting timothy hay when Horse relayed the information.

  “What do it mean for us?” Jess coughed and wiped the sweat from his face before straightening up to look at Horse.

  “I don’t rightly know,” Horse answered.

  Off in the distance, Horse saw two hats astride horses. He shaded his eyes with his hands. The Harrison farm was not on the way to anywhere else, the trail ending at the house, so it was a rare sight to see passersby. He squinted. A slow, dark line snaked behind the horses. The other men were looking now, too. A muffled yell rang out, and though none of the husbands knew whose v
oice it was, each one of them sprang to life, certain he had heard his own name. Among them, Horse’s feet beat through the grass, and he tried to say Annie! As he neared them, he saw the shadow of a white man raising his gun, but Horse could not stop running, even when he heard the shot, because there was the unmistakable figure of Annie crouching at the back of the coffle. Now the women were screaming, and it took a moment for Horse to understand that they were yelling for the men to stop. Horse slowed, glancing around at the husbands. They had halted, but their necks were strung tightly. Horse had to act or they would all get hurt. He searched his head for the words that would save them and opened his mouth, knowing, before he’d uttered a sound, how little he could salvage.

  “Sir, we don’t aim to cause no trouble. We just want to say a word to the women.”

  The man spat. “Women? I don’t see no women.”

  Horse did not look beneath the hat’s brim. “Just a word. That’s all we ask.”

  The hat aimed his pistol at each man, silently counting the three of them and, perhaps, counting his bullets and measuring his speed against six arms and six legs. He spoke from behind the gun: “Make it quick. I ain’t no Christian, neither is you, and hell ain’t no happy place.”

  Horse approached Annie, but he could not look at her. She raised her hands to touch his face and he heard the tinkle of chains. He could see the back of the girl Herod who did not turn around to see this farewell between the only two parents she could remember. Horse wished he had something to give Annie, but he had nothing, not even a drop of water in his can. He heard her sniffle and knew she was crying. He and Annie had lived on the same farm for years, and he could not ever remember her shedding a tear.