Eli crumples this last letter in his fist. Campbell pivots at the sound and stands staring until Eli hands it over. He bends to smooth the paper flat on the table but seems disappointed to find only last week’s date and the words my dear boy hovering over a scattering of small sketches. Campbell sets this last letter beside his father’s body and follows his brother out to the porch where Wash and Mena wait.
Wash is already a head taller than his mother and filling out. Eli steps close to him and takes hold of his chin, turning his face to the sun then lifting his top lip with one thumb to look at his teeth. Wash spins away from him shocked but Eli grabs his collar to jerk him back around. Mena steps close behind Wash, her fingers closing around his wrist before he can lift his arm to strike. He wrestles against her grip but only for a minute because he feels the iron in it.
It’s all different now, she tells him over and over in her old tongue. I told you. I told you and you promised me.
Wash holds himself still until Eli lets go. Paymore steps onto the porch to help the brothers carry their father’s body to the boat. Eli follows him inside and starts directing everybody which corner to take, how to distribute the weight properly and who should go through the door first.
Once they’ve disappeared down the path, Mena leads Wash back into the house, still holding him by the wrist like he’s a child. She looks at him hard until he nods that she can let go. She smooths the crumpled last letter full of drawings and slides it into her pack then pulls the shutters closed. Stands in the doorway, taking one last slow look around, then turns her back on it so sharp and quick it’s as if she’s daring the house to try calling out after her.
By the time they reach the dock, Thompson’s body lies longways in the belly of his boat. Mena can see Wash still has it in his mind to run. He’s thinking he can hide despite her swearing to him those Thompson boys would hunt him down and these roughnecks out here would turn him in for gold. Even if she had not seen it in a dream, she already knew by the way Eli had looked at Wash every time he came to visit his father.
Mena levels her eyes at Wash, herding him onto the boat by force of will. She gives the key to Campbell then puts her hand on Wash’s shoulder to steady herself as she climbs into the rocking boat to sit pressed close against him. His eyes keep jumping to the shore but she doesn’t care so long as he stays on that bench beside her. His breathing does not settle until the pines lining the path to the sound are out of sight.
Mad as Wash is at being manhandled by Eli on the porch and lost as he feels at being wrenched off the island, he is soon overwhelmed by the big Thompson place. Nine hundred acres wrapped around a lake stretching to the horizon, quarters full to bursting with nearly two hundred people and more girls than he has ever seen.
Some boys are still boys at fifteen but some are already young men like Wash, as physically graceful as he is shy, nodding yes or shaking his head no, with rivers of words damming up behind his lips as he walks in step with his mother through the quarters to the farthest cabin. Raising his eyes here and there, trying to make some sense of this place so as to better map his course.
He knows how to read the sky for storms. He knows how to hunt and track and trap, how to ride and cook and sew and swim and catch and bend to fit. But when he goes looking for answers inside himself about this place, they aren’t there. He misses the quiet of the island but he feels the pull of all this newness, even though it knocks him off balance.
And the girls turn his head till he’s flustered. All the longing that’s rising in those girls, they send it straight for Wash. The rest of these boys, the girls have grown up with them. Seen their mammas snatch them back when they made trouble and watched them squall like babies. But all they’ve seen Wash do is walk tall and dark and beautiful behind his mother. Holding himself to himself, with his voice and his lip darkening into smoky shadows even as he still carries the sweetness of a child.
Mena knows how it will be. It will be some girlwoman, a little bit older than the rest. She will dowse for Wash like water and she will find him. Draw him off to the side then draw him up into himself. Make him into a man. Her man. It’s hard on Mena, thinking about Wash no longer being hers alone, but she’d rather it happen with this girlwoman who knows how to look after herself than with one of these young girls so flighty they can’t stand still.
It’s nice when one of you is older and can take the other by the hand. She had put herself in Wash’s father’s hands like she knew he wasn’t going to drop her and he didn’t. But the women had been telling her all her life how it would be so she was prepared. They had told her how his fingers drumming on her skin would be his calling God up inside her, just like her feet drumming on the skin of the ground had always been her way of calling God up inside her.
She knew this to be true because she had felt it for herself through her whole childhood, with her bare feet drumming their small perfect patterns into the soft dust until she felt God start coming right up from underneath the hard dry ground to move through her and through all of them. So on that second night, when Wash’s father’s fingers first touched her skin, when she became the drum, and when she heard feelings like sounds being called up through the hollow middle of her, this new thing did not seem like a new thing at all. It was instead the one thing she knew for sure in this brand new, upside down world.
The women had told her how this would be, but the pieces don’t fall in place until they fall in place inside of you. Some people, this learning happens too early and some it happens too late but Mena was lucky in that it happened to her right on time. She only wants something close to the same for Wash.
He starts out trying to learn this new life by turning to his mother but the others tease him for it. Their calling him a mamma’s boy burns in him even though he’s unsure what they mean. Pot calling the kettle black is all Mena will say about it, but pretty soon Wash starts slipping away from her, sliding around the corner of their cabin even as she’s calling him, acting like he can’t hear her.
She has known best for so long and she has always been right. But now she does not seem so right to him anymore. He’s itching to know things on his own. And he has heard the others start to talk about her and it worries him. That she’s too serious and too dark too. Thinks she’s better than the rest. Might even be some kind of witch, with all that African.
Mena knows she’s being standoffish but she also knows there’s plenty of time to make herself indispensable. She’s using the time before they’re hooked in tight to see this new place clear so she will know how to survive it. She hasn’t stitched the two of them to anybody yet because she’s still deciding whom to choose.
But she can’t get too mad with Wash. She sees how it is for him to have real people right next to him instead of misty clouds of spirits chasing him across that windswept island, so she lets him run and play and fool around but she tries to watch sharp too.
What she’s given Wash seems so little compared to what she wanted him to have coming into this world. She wanted a group of men who could take him off to initiate him like they did the boys at home. She had loved watching those boys straggle away, looking so pitiful, only to come walking back into the village weeks later, no taller but somehow bigger, carrying such a knowing in their eyes. Now she wishes she had paid more attention to what little the boys would tell her.
Mena thinks back to her father and grandfather and brothers and uncles. How they had acted, what they had said, and the meaning that lay behind those words. All she knows is that death must draw close. It must make sure you die to childhood before you can call yourself grown because everybody knows you can never become an ancestor without having gone through some kind of initiation. But how close must death come? And how do you meet it so it will pass on by?
Her mother had told her that a girl’s coming of age heads straight for her. When it comes time for that first baby to make his way from belly to out, that’s when she will stand on the brink between the worlds and be able
to see across. She will be her own threshhold. And Mena had found that truth for herself. When she brought Wash into this world, she’d been carried to that place in the veil where it goes thin. But what about him?
She wishes she had looked more closely at every bit of her world when she was growing up so she could give more of it to Wash but it had been wrapped so close around her, she had no idea she would ever be without it. The women had started teaching her but they did not have time to finish, so she knows the shape and feel of ceremony but not how to recreate it all by herself. She tried to show Wash the rituals she remembered but they felt hollow and small out on that island with no drumming or dancing except what the two of them did. It was when she tried to show him these patterns that she felt most alone.
It was harder to call God up on her own than it had been with everybody moving together at home, so Mena was in a way relieved to come over to the big Thompson place, with all these new people sitting in a circle around the fire on Saturday night. People talking, telling stories and making music, letting the music swell amongst them like a live thing and then having to move.
She waits a few weeks before deciding to let Wash go to the fire. The night is soft and even a little cool. As they draw close to that glowing warmth, the near side of the circle falls quiet. The dancing stops. A fierce woman named Agnes leans into the gathering, brandishing her worn Bible and complaining about what she calls carrying on with the devil.
“You all had best watch out for carrying on like this and acting all niggerish when what we need is the Lord.”
Sissy turns from her slow circle stomp and stares the woman down.
“That’s not the devil, that’s God. I’m not putting up with this mess all day and most nights and give up on God moving in me too.”
Mena’s heart blooms open and she feels a loosening in the middle of her chest. As she draws a suddenly deeper breath, she knows this place might be worse than the island in plenty of ways but it will be better in others. She looks over and sees Wash standing just within the rim of firelight, watching the music start up again. Paymore’s long fingers slap the smooth side of a cut off piece of hollow log and Core makes drumming sounds with his hands, alternating between the side of his cheek and his open mouth. The sounds the men make start to move through the women and the girls, like the music is trapped inside them and dancing its way out.
Wash looks and looks. He doesn’t realize his mouth is hanging a little bit open until his lips have gone dry. Mena sneaks peeks at him and she can see him saying to himself, this is it. This is what she’s been trying to tell me.
Wash looks over at her and she nods as if to say, see? And he nods to say yes he does see, with his eyes shining.
Wash
We landed at Thompson’s just as the man was coming up in me and those girls circled so close I couldn’t hardly see straight. I wasn’t used to so many folks at one time. Not right there with me, living and breathing. I’d stick round as long as I could stand it, then I’d slip away to the barn or the woods, saying I had work to do. But trying to keep my mind on my task was like trying to hold my hand on something hot and all I wanted was to run towards those girls.
I remember feeling that connection rising in me, liked to turn me inside out. A little like running with the island ponies, grabbing some mane and swinging up, feeling their muscles moving under my legs wrapped round so tight, with their backs rising and falling in waves, all of us pouring through the salty flats, kicking water everywhere. This new feeling was like that but bigger and more in the middle of me.
I’d play chase with the girls and wrestle with the boys and all of it made me feel funny inside. I’d be running after one girl, panting with laughing, and I’m grabbing her skinny arm she’s flailing behind her. I’m pulling her to me and when I’m pulling, I’m feeling that feeling. I want to pull and pull but there’s nowhere closer to pull her. She’s already up against me and then I guess I’m squeezing her too tight till her screaming giggling turns to more like screaming. And she’s twisting and yanking her wrist out of my grip, drawing it to her chest and rubbing it while she backs away. Looking at me like she’s scared of me. The rest of the girls fan out, leaving us boys with nothing to do but jump on each other.
One time, I was standing there looking at the ground, still puzzling over a girl pulling away from me, and that’s right when Friday jumped on me from behind. My head snapped back so hard I heard my teeth slam together. I had an eyeful of clouds and I was stumbling forward trying not to fall. He was the biggest of the boys before I got there and his arm was hooked hard round my neck.
I don’t know what led me to it, but he was on my back and I felt his face real close over my shoulder, so I curled in a running somersault, trying to land him on his head while I ducked and rolled out of the way. Worked like I thought it might. There I was, bouncing back to standing, and there was Friday, laying spreadeagle on the ground, just blinking.
I stepped round to where I could look in his eyes and asked him was he all right. When I put my hand out to help him up, I felt the rest of everybody thinking something new about me. All I’m thinking is how I just got lucky, but something stopped me from saying it. Something in me liked all those new folks looking up to me.
That was the beginning, I guess. Then it kept happening like that wherever I went. At the very first, it felt good. I spent my whole life to fifteen without nobody round, then there’s folks swarming me like bees. Sizing me up. Either trying to take me down a notch or else trying to get next to me. And I wasn’t doing nothing to make it happen except being myself. Felt like a nice surprise back then. I wasn’t looking for it or asking for it neither. It just came, like to visit me, and it turned my head for a long while.
Then I got greedy. Started trying to make it happen instead of letting it happen. Wasn’t till later when I started trying to stop it from happening. Tried to take it apart. Let all those scared and broken parts show so folks would quit heaping their hopes on me.
But way back when I was first chasing those girls and wrestling those boys at Thompson’s place, back then it was still easy. So smooth it made me feel like all roads led to me.
One Sunday after we’d been there awhile, I was fixing the rope swing on the sideways branch of the old sycamore down in the bottom for the little ones like Sissy told me to. And then there was Minerva, sneaking between me and the speckled trunk of that tree, looking at me, all full of I don’t know what. She was leaning back against that trunk and watching me. Reaching out every now and then to tickle my sides while I had my arms up, trying to set that ladder.
I’m telling her wait but she won’t and she’s laughing. She’s almost as dark as me. Her eyes shine bright in her smooth face and they tip up at their outside corners, making her look like she’s carrying a secret. She’s tall for a girl but bony. Skinny still with her raggedy dress tight under her arms.
Something inside me wants to move in on Minerva, press her against that trunk and hold her tight between me and the stillness of that tree. Feels like somebody new moving inside me, trying to make himself at home. But I don’t know what to do with him yet so I’m just standing there, like I’m caught in a trance. I can’t move. Not even my hands. I’m still holding that ladder.
But Minerva didn’t know what she was hunting. She just wanted to put her front up in my front and then turn and run so she did. I chased her but she was fast and she wanted to get away. Before I’m even close to catching her, we’re running up into the edges of Sissy’s fire circle in the quarters, out of breath and laughing.
Sissy took one look at me tearing after Minerva like that and sent me after some dove eggs. Told me she needed em to stretch some soup she was fixing. I saw a couple of the women cutting their eyes at each other and leaning close when I left but I didn’t think too much about why till later.
So there I go, loping round the corner of the barn to the far shed where she told me to climb quiet as a mouse up that ladder to sneak her some eggs from w
here that dove was nesting inside the eaves. I lift the hanging door at the top of the ladder and it’s just big enough for me to stick my whole top half inside.
I’m feeling round on the ledge along the back wall with my hand, hunting for the nest like she told me to, and my eyes are getting used to the inside being darker than the outside. Quiet as I am, I hear it straight away but I have no idea what it is. I’m hearing something moving before I’m seeing anything and I get goosebumps.
Then I start to see through the dim and it’s Rufus and Cleo all wrapped up in each other down on the floor. Rufus is the biggest saltwater man on the place and then some. He’s the blacksmith with his own forge and Cleo runs the hospital those Thompsons built to keep us on the job. Everybody stays kinda scared of em both, but here they are, all wrapped up in each other on a blanket they laid on the straw.
And here I am, looking right at em. They don’t see me yet but I see them. I’m standing there, half in and half out, leaning my hips against the ledge with the swinging door resting on the back of my shoulders. I’m feeling round in the shadows for the prickly straw curve of the nest and those smooth warm eggs. Trying to pick em up real careful and slip em in this pouch hanging from round my neck without dropping em, and remembering to leave one like Sissy told me.
But really all I’m doing is watching Rufus and Cleo moving into each other so smooth and slidy slow, like that big king snake I found in the grain one time. She’s laying on her back, facing up under him, and he’s laying on his belly, facing down over her. I can see her hands running up and down his back, slow and smooth like breathing, and I can see him moving into her and into her, like he’s going somewhere important. Her legs wrap round his hips and her calves shine where they press flat against him from how tight she’s holding on. All I can do is look and watch and see, saying to myself, oh.
Just then Rufus sets one hand in the straw to lift up a little so he can lay more alongside Cleo. And then I see all of her, laying full out in the straw, and she’s running her own hands up and down her own self, like she’s her own candy. He bends his head down and puts his mouth on her. Sucking like a baby, with his leg snaking over her, and she’s arching back like she’s stretching.
Wash Page 10