Wasn’t too much of a problem. I’d stretch my hand out towards an edge and stay ready to grab ahold of it whenever I got to it, acting like I knew what I was doing, so nobody caught on to what I was seeing and what I wasn’t. But in that shop, you got to set a piece just right then send your hammer down on that one right place at just the right angle, telling the metal which way you want it to go. You need to be able to see your edges clear.
Started out fine that first morning back. Felt good to be back in there with Rufus. All the jobs lined up on the wall. The sound of the fire. No talking till nearly lunchtime.
“Trying to keep you out of trouble.”
“Trouble came to me, didn’t it?”
He nodded and that eyebrow went up, “Right straight for you.”
I knew Rufus was worried about my seeing from the way he acted. He tried to start me out slow and easy but I wasn’t having none of it. I went right at it because I needed to know too. Started in on that ax blade he’d been saving for me to finish. But soon as I missed my first strike, Rufus was quick to stop me and put me on a different job. I knew he’d been watching me out of the corner of his eye the whole time, ready to jump in before I had too much chance to see what the trouble was.
I’m standing there holding my ax blade with my tongs, looking at it laying there on my anvil, watching it cool. I’m looking at that first wrong dent I made with my first wrong blow on my first morning back when Rufus turns and wraps one hand round my tongs right below where I’m holding em. Then he holds out his other palm for me to give him my hammer. He steps between me and the anvil, saying why don’t you find that other blade I finished yesterday and see does it need oiling.
I stood there looking at that big old back, watching his hand lifting my hammer up and letting it drop, watching him finish off my piece. Smoothing out my blade. After a minute of me standing there behind him, Rufus stopped, like he could feel my stillness. Then he threw a look over his shoulder, saying well if you don’t want to oil that blade then go carry me in another load of charcoal.
When I looked at the charcoal bin and saw it was already full to overflowing, that was when the mad rose up in me like fire roaring from the bellows. I knew better than to grab his shoulder and turn him to me so I stepped round from behind. I stood facing him across that anvil where he had laid my ax blade cooling. I was mad with him for treating me like I didn’t know nothing, like he could keep anything from me, like I wasn’t even grown.
“What the hell do you think I don’t know? What you think I can’t see?”
Rufus tried to turn away but I followed him, circling round, trying to stay in his face. But he kept turning, making me bark up at him like a hound that’s got something treed.
“What you gonna tell me about how to do now? Huh? Huh?”
I’m good and yelling now and Rufus stopped turning away from me. He laid my hammer down then he let go the tongs and my cold ax blade fell to the floor, jangling and clanging. He turned towards me, slapped me across my face and told me to shut my mouth. I knew how close he was by how his shape filled my eye but then he went blurry from tears welling up. I don’t know how long went by before anything happened.
All I know is after a while, I heard my teeth chattering together, loud as bones being played inside my head. I remember trying to stop the sound by clamping my jaws shut, but soon as I’d draw another big breath, they’d start up again. I couldn’t clamp down hard enough to keep my teeth from chattering and still breathe at the same time.
Next thing I know, Rufus has me pulled close. One arm wrapped round my back real tight with the other elbow resting on my shoulder, making a fist that’s falling real light, over and over against the good side of my head.
Rufus had pulled me to him once or twice before when I was littler and he was proud of something I did or tickled by something I said. But this was different. Those other times had been easy and relaxed. He’d grab me and then turn me loose right quick, moving on to the next thing.
This time was different. Rufus stood so still he felt like a block of wood. His arm wrapped tight round my back felt like a board trapping me and I started to panic. I’d never wanted to get away from him before and my head didn’t fit under his chin anymore. My ear was right next to his cheek and I heard him say something sounding like I’m sorry, but so soft I’m still not sure whether it was just him breathing. I looked over his shoulder at his shop wrapped warm round us, knowing there was no place in it for me and wondering what the hell was I gonna do now.
I just waited for him to drop his arm so I could go. Soon as Rufus loosed his grip, I turned and headed for the door. That’s when I saw I had to duck to get through it. Tall as Rufus all the sudden. Guess I’d been laying there growing all that spring while my mamma was healing my head.
Found out later, those Thompson boys called Rufus up to the house that same night Eli hit me. Told him to pick out some other boy for his shop. Said I was coming up too much trouble. Said only a born fool would keep putting me in that shop with him and all those locks and shackles and keys. They’d send me so far out in the fields I wouldn’t hardly remember Rufus or Cleo or none of em.
He’d stood there on the porch nodding, saying lemme sleep on it. Telling em he’d pick somebody in the morning. Trying to buy himself some time till Cleo could hand him the name of some boy she knew wouldn’t get on his nerves too bad.
Wasn’t till later when Rufus told me how he stood there saying to those boys, mmmhmmm and yessirrrrsssss, all slurred like that, letting em think he was drunk and hearing em laugh at him when he stepped off the porch. Said he even felt drunk and dizzy too from trying to smother being mad at em for taking me and ruining me so easy. Said he was so mad, he barely had enough juice left over to make his mouth and his face do what he needed em to do till he could walk away from that house.
Said all he knew was he wasn’t seeing things too clear himself anymore and he needed all the help he could get. Wasn’t too long after that when Cleo got sold and Rufus started going downhill.
∞
There is no particular thing that leads Cleo by the hand toward poisoning those Thompson boys that summer after Eli hit Wash. Life has started to get better instead of worse after some of old man Thompson’s friends pay a few calls, telling those boys they need to stop having these troublesome incidents with their negroes. Reminding them that Eli still needs a wife and make no mistake, people talk.
But every time that overseer Pickens steps over the line, one or another young man comes to Cleo in her hospital, asking for poison, talking about what he’s going to do to that overseer man. How he wants to stand up there in the doorway of Pickens’s house, watching him lying on his floor jerking and drooling, pulling his furniture down around him. Cleo just shakes her head.
“No you ain’t. Not in a million years. That won’t fix nothing. Knock him down and it’ll be somebody new. Use your head now, use your head.”
Those are the things Cleo says and she means them. But there’s always a deeper layer, running underneath all the reasoning and the making sense. It is this deep down layer that leads Cleo’s mind through thinking about poisoning those Thompson brothers. About them dying and being gone. Stopping them from talking about her the way they do.
Her everyday mind knows it doesn’t make any sense. Knows she can usually find a way to make things all right. Knows she wants to keep seeing Rufus coming through their cabin door, earning enough money to buy them both before too long. Knows there’s some other white man who would come in even if she did somehow kill all these here. She knows this and she tells it to herself over and over but that underneath part is not listening.
It isn’t anything specific. Just a rise in the river. Given a certain amount of rain within a certain time, a river will jump its banks and there’s nothing anybody can do.
As Cleo goes about her work in that little hospital, she sees how to do it. She watches herself in her mind’s eye, grinding those medicines into some kind of poison
with her mortar and pestle. The cool of the stone bowl warmed by her hand cupping it. She feels the give and crunch of the medicine as she grinds it down. Even turns her head to the side so as not to breathe any of its dust.
Rufus always tells her she best be careful where she lets her mind go because it remembers and holds the tracks of every step. And he’s right. All that running her mind over it she does just to get herself through the day starts adding up and spilling over. Like Rufus says, even when your mind wanders, it’s going someplace, and all that traveling adds up. Builds momentum until you got to go somewhere and do something. Cleo just stops stopping herself, that’s all. Once she lets herself grind up the poison, it’s already done.
All it takes is one pass through the kitchen where Hannah has left the fire untended to carry a dish into the dining room. When Cleo looks down into that cookpot and sees those chunks of good meat in it, she goes ahead because she knows none of hers will get any. Pours her powder into their stew with a couple of stirs and walks back out the door. All of it as smooth and easy as a dream.
It isn’t until later that night when it hits her. Sitting with Rufus on their bench, leaning against the far side of their cabin, she hears herself telling him what she has done. The words drop from her mouth like marbles in a steady clinking rush to fall still in the dust at their feet. She says it so casual, mixed in with other things about her day, that Rufus does not hear it right at first.
“Maylene had her baby and we named him Early because he was. Justice finally broke his fever and recognized me. I poisoned those Thompsons that was at the table tonight.”
Rufus sits there, warm and easy next to her. Relaxed. Thinking about going fishing with Wash. Digging for worms. The rock of the boat. But now there is something nagging at him, like a bug in his face he needs to swat but his hands are busy.
It takes him a long while to turn and look into her face and in that time, Cleo sees she has taken her life and broken it with her own two hands. Then Rufus is on his knees on the ground in front of her with his arms wrapped around her hips and his head and shoulders in her lap. She looks down onto the back of his close cropped head and she watches it tilt back and forth, feeling him saying to her no. No. All without making a sound.
She cups his head in her hands, asking God to please wake her from this dream, but God is nowhere to be found. She lets her hands be soft and heavy on Rufus’s head, smoothing his brow toward his scalp. Waiting for lights to start coming on in the big house. Seeing now there is no way every one of them got enough poison to kill them all.
Rufus lifts his head to look at her as he rolls back off his knees onto his haunches, not even asking her what will they do now, knowing she does not know. He moves onto the bench to sit next to her again, letting what she has told him come in on him anew. Feeling himself cut open on a blade so sharp that he does not yet feel pain. Only a sudden breeze, cool on the wetness of laid open skin.
He lets his head fall back and rolls it side to side against the rough wall of the cabin. He is holding her hand. He feels the edge of the cornering strip on the window and he raises his head off the wall only to let it fall harder and harder against the edge of that strip until he can feel something besides the echoing empty space of Cleo not being right here by him and with him.
“You got to go. They’ll tell.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“Road leads straight to you.”
Cleo nods.
A few lights come on through the dark. Both of them can hear a horse galloping down the long drive.
Rufus draws her hand into his lap.
Cleo waits.
“Where I’m gonna go they can’t find me? Everybody know me. How far I’m gonna get, running and tripping and falling all the way? Dogs’ll catch me by tomorrow sundown.”
Rufus looks at their bare feet side by side in the dirt.
“Can’t see just how it will go, but I don’t want it like that.”
They sit together. After a while, Rufus stands up slow as an old man, still holding her hand, drawing her with him down toward the old dock that’s overgrown and forgotten by now. Behind the low wooden wall gone silvery, with the lake water lapping underneath.
It isn’t until early that next morning that they come back. What almost saves Cleo is the way she comes walking up from the old dock, hand in hand with Rufus and love hanging off of her like moss in the trees. Nobody can believe, in the face of everything that’s about to happen to her, that a woman would be trying to find her some sugar.
Once they reach the quarters, Cleo looks quietly into Sissy’s face until the older woman stops yelling. Then she opens her fingers. Rufus’s warm palm slips from between them and Cleo feels the cool morning air take its place. She turns away from both of them and heads to the house to see if she can make herself the only casualty.
Sixteen people are sold that day. There is no telling anybody the facts. Eli wants the entire kitchen and hospital staff off the place immediately. Sold before word gets out. That is how his grandfather always said to handle it and he knew about poisonings. They do not beat Cleo because they want as much money for her as they can get and because Eli does not trust himself not to kill her.
Besides, he says, no one died. Just a whole lot of cramping, throwing up and bloody diarrhea. Once things calm down, Eli decides it makes a good story. He tells it for years.
∞
Wash
Soon as those Thompson boys found out I couldn’t see straight, they put me in the field. Like they’d been waiting on the chance. Said they wanted me at the far end of the last row. Told that damn Pickens to run me into the ground.
They were caught between wanting to whip me trying to make me do right and not wanting to send me home torn up. I’d a thought the feel of that hammer coming down and sinking hard into the side of my head woulda lasted em a while but I guess not.
I heard em figuring how they’d tell Richardson about my scar. They decided they’d tell him that boom swung round and nailed me before I saw it coming. Even though they’d been yelling at me, I hadn’t looked in time. They’d tell him I was plenty strong but not too good at listening.
Once they had their story straight, they told Pickens to watch for leaving any more marks on me, but said he had some leeway seeing as I was so dark. Said he’d have to whack me pretty good to make it show. That’s like trying to find your way on a moonless night is what they said.
And Pickens sure did like to mess with me. He knew the hardest thing was for me to see other folks knocked round and can’t do nothing about it. At first, I spent my time trying to watch where he was headed and then trying to get there first. The bigger boys were on their own but I didn’t like seeing the mammas falling in the dirt. I stayed so busy trying to stop his hand from coming down, or else trying to make it come down on me instead, it’s a wonder I got any cotton in my sack at all.
Pickens got so he’d do it just past my reach. All I could do was make sure he saw me looking at him good. Then he got so he’d be sure to do it just on account of my watching. I was bringing him down harder on us and everybody started cussing me. Said put your damn nose in your cotton sack and keep it there.
It took me a while to learn not to look. That was where I tripped and fell over my growing up. That right there was where old man Thompson was wrong to leave me to myself for so long. Out on that island, full of storms and roughnecks, folks could see folks. Not all the time, but more times than just a few. Storm coming and you need some help battening down your house, they helped you. Somebody got a gun, you get out the way, no matter who it is or isn’t.
It didn’t matter that my mamma was somebody’s negro. When those chickenlegged wild boys from up island heard the old man died and came snooping through the woods to mess with us, she stood on that porch with his gun pointed right at em and she was ready to use it. They backed off sure as you know it.
This place was a new world and old habits die hard. But I finally learned to mind my own b
usiness. Pickens couldn’t whip me but that didn’t mean he couldn’t knock me round good then stake me out in the hot sun by the canal where the marsh grew thick and the mosquitoes covered you like a blanket. So I let it go piece by piece, my picture I’d put together out there on that island about how the world worked and how people are. Only some people, I started telling myself. Only some people.
Rufus had kept me out of trouble until that hammer. After that, I was in the field but good. I tried fighting and I tried running, but everything I tried came right back round on my mamma. At first, those boys did it real direct. Made sure I knew each day I ran off and stayed gone in the swamp was one more day my mamma didn’t get her rations.
But I knew they wouldn’t take it all the way since they needed her to make those christening dresses to sell. My mamma knew it too. She sat there, wadding that pale cotton, shaking it in her fist at me, saying go!
At first, she tried to hold me back. She worried for me out in the woods but with the way things were going, she saw I’d likely be safer there. She didn’t think they’d kill me just to get me home. She hoped they’d leave me alone. Glad to be rid of me.
Folks did that a lot. Ran up in the woods and stayed for three or four days. They weren’t going nowhere. Just needed a break. Trying to clear their head before they did something stupid. All she wanted was a way to get word to me when time came for us to leave.
I made my way pretty far up in the swamp on the far side of the lake. Slipped out and back as often as I could. Then I started staying longer and longer. Weeks at a time and it burned those boys up. I stayed careful but there was folks tucked everywhere. Even in deserted looking places. People all round and somebody always ready to make that dollar.
Those times when I was on the place, I’d go by the shop sometimes after leaving the fields. Take Rufus some toddy. He practically lived there now Cleo was gone.
When I wanted some quiet, I’d go sit with him. It stayed close and hot inside but it felt good to me. I’d pick up a rag so gritty with soot and scale, it was heavy in my hand. Just holding that dirty rag made me bite down with missing working in his shop.
Wash Page 15