Wash

by Margaret Wrinkle

  And just like she was waiting on me, hanging on till I stepped up and took hold of myself, my mamma died with peace on her. She knew she was leaving me safe and going home. Told me I had everything I needed and I’d be fine.

  I do wonder if she saw all I had coming down the road to me. Every single one of these little ones comes carrying some shade of her. Maybe that’s why I kept at it. Maybe I was doing some good, keeping her with me long after she was gone.

  ∞

  Mena told Wash two things before she left. He had to learn to rest and he had to find himself some joy. No matter what and no matter how. He had listened to her without realizing how much of his joy was wrapped up in her. But after she died, he started to see how he was truly off to himself and alone.

  Everybody else can get together, eat and drink and talk or even fight, just to blow off some steam. But let Wash walk into that pocket of open space between those cabins where everybody gathers late Saturdays into Sundays and he can see them all draw back a little and tighten up. He knows they don’t like having to look at him because of the pictures he pulls up in their minds. Makes dinner turn dusty in their mouths.

  And it doesn’t help to head over to some other place where people don’t know him so well because he has already been sent to most of them. The rest have heard all about him and think they know something.

  He sneaks out to Mena’s grave whenever he can manage and it helps some. Richardson had wanted to bury her in the family plot up by the house but Wash was glad Mary wasn’t having that. And he didn’t want her in the cemetery Richardson kept for his negroes either. Mena always said it stayed too cluttered in there for her to see where she was headed.

  Wash was relieved when Richardson let him have this one thing. Permission to bury her somewhere secret. He found a good spot, high on a sloping spit of land jutting out into the river where it runs wide and deep around the bend, right at the far edge of Richardson’s place. Under a group of sweet gum trees where she can see the sun shine gold on the water as it sets.

  He hadn’t had time to take her there to show her because she went quickly. As soon as her clear burning spirit started to flicker, it only took a day. Once she knew she could take her eyes off Wash, all she wanted to do was look where she was going. Said she wanted to make sure she got there.

  Wash finds some good rest with an old woman over at Pleasanton. A little bitty scrawny woman who had known his mother, Binah rides herd on the smallest children while everybody else is in the field. After Wash is done for the day, he goes to visit with her. Sits on the stump next to hers while she sucks on her pipe whether it’s empty or full. She pats at Wash sitting there next to her, nodding and patting his leg like he’s not a grown man.

  Together they watch the children. When one boy toddles over to the fence and manages to clamber up to the first rung, Binah calls to him. He turns his head to look then wobbles hard and starts to cry. Wash goes to the boy, takes him around his middle to pull him off the fence and carry him back to Binah. When he sets him down in front of her, the boy steadies himself with one hand on each of Binah’s knees but stares up at Wash and keeps on staring long after Wash has sat down on his stump.

  Wash smiles back at first then has to look away. He gets snappish with Binah and rough with the boy. Stands up and paces, kicking at sticks and looking for the horizon. He does and doesn’t want to know whether the boy is his. He can’t yet see himself in that small square face with its steady gaze. Wash doesn’t know what he himself looked like as a toddler but he hears old man Thompson telling him about how he came into the world.

  “Solemn as a judge. Looked right through me from day one.”

  It won’t be until later that Wash starts seeing flashes of himself and of all his people Mena had told him about shining from the faces of his growing up children. By that time, he will have stopped sitting with Binah. It’s too much and too close. Easier to come and go and then stay gone.

  After a little while, Binah tips her head to call Wash back to her and he comes. She looks around sharp then digs in her pocket for her talisman. Gnarled worn leather stitched with red and soaked in spirit. She holds it out to Wash and he takes it even though Mena always told him never touch somebody else’s piece. With Binah, he knows it’s all right. Just holding her piece makes him feel calmer.

  When he sits back down, she turns to him and takes one of his big hands in her two bent feathery ones. Opens his fingers out and lays his palm flat against her throat just over that hollow dip. Presses it tight. His fingers reach almost around to the back of her neck.

  She sits there staring at him with her chin dipped so she’s looking up at him hard. The loose skin of her throat slides under the weight of his hand and the force of her grip. And they just sit there like that until he starts to feel her pulse. Until her pulse grows and grows under the flat of his palm, throbbing all the way through his hand and up his arm then crowning warm across the top of his head.

  He catches his breath and cuts his eyes over at her but she stares right at him with her face falling open in the light of the spirit, telling him as clear as if she is saying it out loud, you feel that? You hear that? You ain’t got nothing to worry about, boy.

  After that day, he sits there next to Binah, in amongst those children playing in the dirt at his feet, some of the littlest ones his, and he leans back against the wall of the shed, dozing in the shade and feeling almost peaceful.

  But not all these children want him around. Especially the boys getting almost old enough to leave Binah behind as they head for the fields. They can’t see why he sits with Binah while the rest of the grown folks have to work, and there’s something strange in the way their parents act toward Wash, so they keep sassing him, no matter how many times Binah tries to knock it out of them. Makes him glad to disappear into the woods running traplines even if it is for Richardson.

  What surprises Wash is that he finds himself glad to have Richardson’s favorite son wanting to tag along behind. Even as a slight and tender ten year old, Lucius looks just like his father. Sharp brown eyes under dark brows with that same widow’s peak. He stays forever after Wash who finds some peace with Richardson’s boy. Remembering what Mena had told him, Wash lets himself have it. But he doesn’t let Lucius know he’s anything but tolerated and he never takes him to Mena’s grave.

  It is months of following Wash along Richardson’s traplines before Lucius dares to ask him anything. That is the bargain. Lucius can tag along but he has to keep his mouth shut. Wash can hear the questions he wants to ask burning inside him anyway.

  What happened to your head? Why don’t you have to go to the fields with the rest? Where do you keep going off to in that wagon? How come you know what your daddy looks like if you’ve never seen him?

  But Lucius knows better than to ask those questions and soon enough, they give way to other questions because there are still plenty of things that need knowing.

  “How do you know the deer came through here?”

  “How do you tell your direction when it’s noon?”

  “Why did that dog bury her puppies in the leaf compost?”

  “Did she mean for them to die?”

  Wash lets the questions pour over him like sweat running down. He keeps on doing whatever he’s doing, bending to check or set a trap then rising to walk on, pausing only to pull back a low branch to reveal the double crescent moons of deer tracks in the damp earth or to shake his head no, the bitch had not meant for her puppies to die.

  Wash only speaks after they’ve been quiet for a long while, dropping an answer into the stillness as sudden as a fish jumping and then gone. Lucius will wonder whether he heard it at all.

  “She was trying to keep em warm.”

  Lucius stows Wash’s few comments away, wrapping them up in soft cloth to take out later and study over.

  Wash starts out putting up with Lucius as just one more thing, thinking God sure has been thorough with him this time. But he feels forever alone these da
ys and Lucius is new like a pup and playful. Sometimes Wash has to hold his hand back from knocking that innocence right out of the boy but most times he manages to let it please him. And Wash hears Mena talking to him as they walk through the woods.

  “Little enough to take pleasure in and a body gets stuck in the mud not letting God touch you at all, anytime, just because life won’t go the way you want.”

  And Wash likes the way the boy hangs on his words. The attention feels good. Almost makes him want to say more but then he hears Emmaline muttering, don’t never trust a white child over the age of twelve and most don’t even make it that far.

  Wash keeps his stories to himself but he teaches Lucius the trees and the birds, the tracks and the nests. He pauses, listening to the red fox call until he sees the boy hear it too. He makes sure Lucius knows how to keep an eye on the sun and how to listen for the river to find his way home.

  It feels good to give over some of the knowing that Mena and Rufus had filled him with but Wash makes sure to stop before Lucius has had enough. Always keep them wanting more. Never let them see the bottom.

  Lucius stays careful. Careful to keep his mouth shut and careful to sneak up to Wash’s nook in the high loft only when he knows Wash is gone. Long after he has watched him head off down the road in the back of his father’s wagon. Lucius tries not to leave any sign of the hours he spends up there but Wash can usually tell. He shakes his head, both annoyed and somehow pleased the boy needs him that badly.

  It is almost a full year of Lucius walking in Wash’s shadow before Nero wraps his hands around Richardson’s neck on that cold bright morning in the barnyard and ends up lying flat on his back with that great hole torn in his middle.

  It is the next to last Monday in December. The shortest day of the year. Wash and Lucius make it home well past dark after running Richardson’s northern line of traps. They move toward the lights of the place, feeling the almost snow as a wet mist on their faces. Wash navigates through the last of the bare trees by memory while Lucius stretches his stride, still trying to step inside Wash’s tracks across the sodden ground long after he can’t see them anymore. The cluster of small bloodied bodies knocks against first one leg then the other as he switches his burden from hand to hand.

  Something has happened on the place today. Wash senses it before they are within a hundred yards. It makes him feel old to realize he doesn’t even want to know what it is. All he wants to do is wrap his numb fingers around a warm cup of something and put his feet to the fire.

  Without a word, Wash stops and turns to hand his catch to Lucius, holding back a possum as he looks down at the boy sharply reminding him not to tell. Lucius tucks his chin in a nod as he takes the additional weight then struggles for a minute to balance his load. Their single track forks into two as Wash heads for the barn and Lucius turns toward the house.

  Wash knows it’s most likely Nero. He saw early on how that whole story was going to go and decided to steer clear. There are as many ways to hold out as to give in and some of them can get you killed. Sure enough, the fire circle in the quarters is abuzz and there’s a dark brown stain on the hardpacked dirt beside the big barn door. And just inside that door, a pair of long boards laid across two sawhorses. Blood there too. Wash walks right past those sawhorses and climbs up to his loft. He knows he will hear the details from there.

  Lucius slips into the kitchen just before dinner. He hands Emmaline their catch and asks her what happened. She tightens her mouth and shakes her head as she pulls a pail between her knees and starts skinning a squirrel. Lucius leans against her thigh, looking over her shoulder, and asks again, what?

  She cannot bear the thought of answering his endless questions. Even hearing them will be hard for her tonight so she tells him it’s dinnertime and he needs to go sit at the table with everybody else. But first wash those grubby hands. When he comes back to stand beside her instead of going into the dining room like she told him to, she wipes the shine of grease from the corner of his mouth with her thumb, asking him whether he likes squirrel or possum better. He raises his shoulders along with his eyebrows like he can’t really say, dragging out the moment in the hopes that she will relent and tell him the story that everyone else already knows.

  He leans against her as she turns back to her task and she lets him. Despite all her warnings to Wash, she’s been breaking her own rules with Lucius. It’s not that she loves him. It’s just that there’s a dent in her heart that fits his shape because he has been pushed right up against it for so long. Him and nobody else.

  Richardson put her son and her husband out in the quarters, saying surely that was close enough, but it wasn’t. Her grandsons are scared to come in the house and she can’t leave the kitchen, so she lets herself enjoy the fact that Lucius comes to her first, before his own mother and father. It gives her a little something to have so she keeps it. But she’s not telling him this story. Not tonight.

  Lucius finds his sister Livia in the passageway and asks her what happened. She sets down the ladle she came for and bends to put her face close to his, placing one warm hand on each of his narrow shoulders. She tells him in a low steady voice that everything is fine, his father is fine, they are all fine, but one of the new negroes is dead because he started a fight. She says it’s been taken care of now and everything is fine as she turns him toward the dining room and tells him to go on in and sit down.

  He slips into his chair at the dinner table just as his mother starts to say the prayer. While they have their heads bowed, he studies them. After a day spent following Wash through the woods, his own family looks so strange to him. Like people in paintings come down off the wall. Walking and talking, saying please pass the salt and yes you may be excused. He is right there with them but he feels like if he reaches for any one of them, none will be close enough to touch. Not even Livia.

  The prayer ends and the conversation starts back up, bouncing harsh and jerky as it veers both toward and away from the one thing no one is supposed to mention. Lucius looks into his father’s eyes as he is asked about his Latin lesson and all he can feel is the impossibility of conveying to him the wide sweep of the horizon from that high rocky bluff overlooking the river, the smoothness of the small furred bodies he and Wash collect from the traps, the steady quiet rhythm of Wash’s hands building a fire then skinning a squirrel. Humming over it as it cooks. The tenderness of those small juicy chunks of meat, crisp to burnt at the edges. Lucius holds worlds within him that his family does not share and he must wait for all that life to subside before he trusts himself to speak. He watches his father growing impatient with him but he can’t find any words the old man wants to hear.

  “Did Nero get in a fight with you?”

  Richardson looks down the table at his gathered family. He feels the rest of their unasked questions hovering close, full of that exact mix of eagerness dancing over fear that he hears in his hounds’ voices when they have cornered a bear. As Lucius starts to break the silence with a second question, Richardson tackles the thing directly only to get it over with sooner.

  He tells them that they are not to worry. There will be an inquiry which will settle the case for good since he has plenty of eyewitnesses. Most of his people. Too many of them in fact. He tells his family with a harsh bark of a laugh that he might even get his money back since Nero hadn’t been here three months.

  Lucius remains puzzled, his perpetually raised eyebrows hovering high under his dark widow’s peak, but as soon as he opens his mouth, Richardson snaps at him to close it. Hurt rises in the boy’s eyes but his father doesn’t care. As long as it keeps that mouth of his shut for tonight. Richardson stows the whole story away and drags the conversation back into safer waters, grateful to his wife for leading their children through planning Mary Patton’s upcoming birthday party.

  All he can feel is the smooth sturdiness of the wall he has already built between himself and the incident. He does not turn toward it again until everyone has gone to bed and
he is finally alone in his study, drink in hand, diary open. Time to make sense of the day.

  He can feel himself slowing as he draws closer to Nero but he takes great comfort in the detailed texture of his list of small things accomplished. Filled yesterday’s orders, sent two wagonloads of nails down to the dock, placed orders for seven harnesses and extra bits to replace those sold last week.

  He writes his way toward Nero but he feels himself pull up short. When he gets to the point where nothing else happened before Nero stepped up in his face and wrapped his hands around his neck, when he gets to the part where everything grew unbearably bright, blowing out to white before darkness started to seep in due to lack of oxygen, when he gets to the part about the feel of his knife setting its shoulder to the wall of Nero’s low belly until it finally broke through, bringing with it a weakening of Nero’s grip, then the darkness rolling back as he sucked in a deep breath and the world returned from blown out white to its usual vibrancy, when he gets to Nero’s sudden gracelessness, falling slack and dull at his feet, when he gets to all that, he wonders how to tell it.

  The weight of the glass in his palm is all that anchors him as feelings surge inside him, raising the hair on his forearms. He cannot avoid knowing that a part of him finds what happened this morning thrilling, the exhilaration of feeling his own strength, saving his own life. As he waits for these feelings to settle into some kind of clarity, all they do is flutter inside his chest. He downs more bourbon trying to still them but it doesn’t work.

  He looks at the quill pen in his hand and his fingers smeared with ink. Pulls aside the blotter sheet he uses under his writing hand so as not to smear the neatness of his record. The last line reads settlers keep buying bits at double the price. Remind Cassius to bring more back with him from Singleton in New Orleans. After that last line, the golden straw color of the page spills open into blankness.