He can see Gamma and all her foals through the years. The horses they became. He can see his family spread out everywhere and growing. His empire taking shape, his status accumulating. His second son planning to pick up where he left off, expanding his reach. Richardson can throw his mind like a net across everything he had intended but when he draws that net in, it is empty. There is nothing in his hand.
Richardson
I remember thinking my own life was the only one I had. Once it had ended, it would be over. I was convinced we were as clamped inside time as a stone set in a ring. It took being broken open to lift me to some higher ground.
My raising had rendered me unable to see that my story might be a live thing. A creature with intentions of its own. Thompson had tried to warn me, and more than once, but I couldn’t hear him. Whenever he tried to suggest that my story could be using me as much as I was using it, I brushed him off. Told him that sounded like mojo to me.
Accomplishments were what mattered. Failures were gaps to paper over. Being good was being right. Being wrong was due to some secret hidden brokenness. Evidence to be buried. And suffering was to be avoided at all costs.
Each era is knit together by its own logic and we certainly had ours. Most forgeries are discovered only by succeeding generations. The slight gaps and giveaways don’t show up until later because all those living inside the same time as the forger share the same eye and can be more easily fooled.
What interested me was when someone cropped up in his own time with a differing eye. Like my William. And Lucius. They were proof that some few of us can see outside of the logic we are given.
But I knew that seeing alone can’t build enough of a bridge to carry you across. Usually all that seeing does is break you instead so I feared for my boys and rightly so. I may have even urged them to blind themselves a bit, so as to make their journey through a world not of their making slightly smoother.
I had decided early on that all the paths across time and between eras were gone. No one in any time to come would ever be able to see us clearly, so why even hope? What surprised me most was how powerfully I wanted things to be otherwise.
As I aged, I was haunted by dreams of standing deep in tall grass, down close by the edge of a broad shiny river. Even as I remained convinced I would be unable to cross, I remember feeling that strong swift wetness surging up over my shoulders. Pouring around my mouth. Sometimes my whole face. I kept stepping out into that current over and over, even as I was sure I would drown, so I must have known something about the landscape of eternity after all.
Wash
Just cause it’s over, don’t never mean it’s finished.
And no matter how different he was taught, Richardson’s stories stick just as close to him as mine to me. No matter how hard he worked to bury the ones he didn’t want, just like his daddy told him to, they keep pushing up through the dirt like hardy weeds. His dead brother lying scalped, right in the middle of the trail. Those hogs rooting at the men he left behind. Even old Hargrove, still stomping on Moses. But Richardson never did learn to tell his stories to himself, so he left this barn empty handed every time.
What I see now is, our pictures hover close, no matter whether we hold them tight or push em away. Took me all the way till now to see just how far you can fall inside your story and how fast. And every time you try to tell it, that story starts moving, making you find your way through it all over again.
One thing I do know, whichever path you decide to take through that story, it’s up to you to steer your mind one way or let it go another. Every minute of every day. All the way from then to now and beyond.
I remember my mamma telling me to watch out for the pull of that first path. She said once that very first creature makes its way through the tall grass, the rest of us tend to fall right into that same trail, whether it’s the way we meant to go or not. Force of habit cuts a groove and that groove has a pull to it. And every single time I felt myself dragged towards one white man then the next, I saw the truth in what she said. Long enough of that and you start to learn.
But I fought my knowing just as hard as Richardson here. Even when I knew better, I fought it just as hard as I fought everything else. Lucky for me, my stories wore me down till I had to take the truth in my teeth and bite it. Chew it up and swallow it down.
Come to find out, we stay swimming through time whether we like it or not. Everything is now. Already and always.
All those stories you don’t find some way to tell will wrap round your legs, just as sure and sharp as saw grass. You’ll walk through this life and the next, bumping into your memories just as real as Emmaline’s hams dangling in the dark of Richardson’s smokehouse, coated gritty gray with salt and gone dusty with bluegreen mold.
Knock into one of those and you’re wearing it, no matter how hard you try to say otherwise.
Pallas
When I watch Wash falling back into the grip of his story, him and Richardson both, I can hear Phoebe telling me, remembering is more than just falling right back in there. Remembering is more than that. She told me if you don’t watch out, those stories of yours will come right up in your yard and worse. Dropping crumbs on your floor and won’t go nowhere.
“Those stories piled up on your doorstep, they need to learn to let you be. They don’t own you. Let’s see can you travel lighter. Make you a box and lay those stories in there, then close it up good. That way, they’ll be there when you need em and they won’t have to hound you every minute of every day.”
And I can remember sitting there, staring over Phoebe’s shoulder, trying to hear her, trying to picture what it would feel like to be that free, and I felt myself floating right up off the ground.
But not everybody hears Phoebe inside, and you can see their story twining up around them. They stand there, trying to grow tall like a tree, but there’s poison ivy vines climbing hairy and thick, wrapping around that trunk to choke it, no matter how strong. Makes you wonder who’ll win out.
But Phoebe kept after me. Saying those damn stories so greedy and shortsighted. You can’t give em everything they want, they’ll swallow you whole. Then where will they be, with you gone?
See those stories for clear, was what she told me. Some are children and don’t want to grow up so you got to do the tending.
Then she asks me, how come you think it is I’m still here, standing in front of you, babygirl? How do you think that is? And she’s hugging me to her, and I’m hearing her telling me yes ma’am, we all got a right to the tree of life, and I’m feeling my knowing start to come alive and move.
When I watch these two men get caught up all over again in everything that has happened, I try to remember that feeling of my knowing unfolding inside me, wet as new wings. But I keep my mouth shut because if there is one thing I know by now, it’s that some things you need to come to on your own.
Part Seven
Early summer, 1824
Summer comes early after a wet spring. Richardson is up late again and restless. He wanders outside into that small pocket of quiet after the cicadas have stopped and before the birds start. The heavy dew soaks his boots after a few steps.
Between the house and the barn, there is a dip where the ground sinks and gets marshy, by the pond where cattails and cane grow thick and tall in the low ground. Richardson had made sure to swing his road out wide behind the house before cutting across to the barns to stay clear of this dip that sprawls here. But tonight he has had too much to drink and thinks he should be able to go straight at a thing, damn the consequences.
Wash wakes to Richardson’s thrashing and muttered curses. When he steps across the loft to peer down through a high knothole, the moon is still bright enough for him to see the trail Richardson has blazed. The tops of the cane rustle and cussing drifts out like smoke.
Wash shakes his head, almost smiling. Notices he’s not even mad. That’s when he realizes he’s become a new man. He climbs down the ladders and stairs, slips th
rough the small side door, then walks across the dewy grass to the closest edge of the thick patch of cane. Waits for a break in the thrashing, then coughs once into the silence. Claps his hands softly a couple of times.
After Wash gets Richardson pointed in the right direction, the cane give way and he breaks through in a couple of steps. He’s a mess. Neither man speaks. Richardson gestures loosely back at the thicket as if trying to explain. Although Wash keeps his face smooth and blank as a stone, he nods then turns and Richardson follows him back to the barn. The horses rustle and blow but don’t call out.
Once through the small side door, the two men walk together down the aisle to the foot of the first set of stairs. They climb side by side, in step with one another. Richardson pauses to check Gamma’s last foal before settling himself on the fourth step, just high enough to see over the side of the stall.
Wash leans against the far wall of the aisle, expecting Richardson to start in on the foal. Its dam, its sire and what he had wanted from this particular combination. But Richardson stays quiet. They sit there for what feels like an hour, watching the new bay foal nurse. He shoulders in next to the old gray mare’s flank, snaking his head under her stifle, butting her in his earnestness then settling in for long sure sucks, his short tail twitching with pleasure.
Richardson sits bolt upright but when Wash sneaks a look at him, he sees his eyes have dropped to half closed and sometimes farther. Seems kind of crazy to come all the way down here just to get some sleep but Wash finds himself grateful for the quiet. Once Richardson slumps against the wall with his mouth dropped open and snoring a little, Wash makes his way back up to his blankets and falls straight to sleep.
Both men hear the morning bell cutting through the misty predawn. Richardson wraps his dream around the sound of the bell ringing until it eventually tears his sleep from him. He jerks awake there on the fourth step, his mouth dry as dirt and sour, his clothes sodden and striped by the cane, sharp tips of grass caught in the cloth. The foal sleeps in the straw, his nose tucked behind his folded front feet, while Gamma stands over him, idly sniffing, with a piece of straw hanging from her forelock.
Parts of the night come back to Richardson. Wrestling to walk with the damp cane slapping him in the face, cutting him. Why hadn’t he come by the road? What had he wanted? What had he said and what had Wash said in return? His mind hunts for answers but keeps coming up empty. He thinks about getting back to the house and changed before Emmaline is up and knows it will not happen. The new day settles down on him like a lid on a pot as he pulls himself to standing.
It is on one of these trips to the barn when Richardson takes the book to Wash. He just wants to show it to him. Thinks Wash should know. Thinks Wash would want to know. Richardson even thinks Wash will be grateful for his having kept such careful track.
Somehow, he pictures them sitting there, side by side, turning the broad pages together. He’s already told Wash about it, more than once, but he doesn’t remember having done so. Liquor makes everything seem possible but then sweeps it all clean, like a broom drawn over the dust of a yard. No more tracks. No more record of anything. Just an uneasy feeling.
Richardson sits heavily on the second step, sets his bottle down, then pulls the book carefully from the canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He lays it across his lap, smoothing its broad brick red surface with his hands as if to clean the dust and chaff off of it.
He sits there looking from the book in his lap to Wash standing in front of him at the foot of the stairs and then back at his hands moving slower and slower. He waits for Wash to come sit next to him but Wash stands there, saying nothing. The worn leather feels so soft under Richardson’s hands. He keeps on smoothing it, over and over, until he has lost track of what he intended and forgets Wash is even there. Before too long, Richardson is asleep. Just like last time. Right there where he sits leaning against the wall.
Wash stands so still for so long the first birds are beginning to sing before he bends to take hold of the front corners of the book and draw it carefully toward him, pulling it slowly from under Richardson’s hands which are spread upon it. Richardson does not even stir.
Wash stands there another good while after that. Holding the book close against his chest with both arms crossed over it and his fingers wrapped around its edges. Eventually, he climbs carefully past Richardson and into his loft. He curls around his book and sleeps. He never even opens it. By the time he wakes, the sun flashes bright as the horses pour in from the pasture for breakfast and Richardson is long gone.
Pallas warns Wash to be careful with that book, the worst would be for somebody to catch him with it, but he tells her not to worry. He’ll bury it deep in his sack, under plenty of bloody skins from his traps, until he can hide it good. As for Richardson, he doesn’t remember taking the book to Wash. He does not even realize it’s missing until he goes to make his next entry a few weeks later. By this time, it’s tucked deep inside a silvery gray hollowed stump in the middle of the swamp where Wash and Pallas spend much of their time looking at it together.
Wash sits on one stepped ledge of the creek bank with his feet dangling in the water. Pallas sits close behind him on the next higher ledge, leaning her front against his back, with her legs wrapped around his hips and her ankles crossed in his lap. She rests her chin on his shoulder, watching him trace with his finger all the names and all the lines connecting them. Page after page after page.
Wash had not realized it had been so many. Whenever his finger slows to a pause under one of the names, Pallas says the name aloud. Wash feels the vibration pass from the front of her chest into his back. Right between his shoulder blades. The shape of the sound of each name enters him at the back of his heart.
Each name, poised at the tip of his forefinger, conjures up a world. When Pallas says Vesta, Wash sees her. That gawky gangly girl at Miller’s place who tried to stay dirty and skinny and out of the way but failed. Wash sits there by the creek on this warming up Sunday, feeling Pallas’s legs wrapped snug around him, as he watches Vesta grow up.
She stands taller and more serious each time she flashes into his mind’s eye. As the years pass, their three boys stairstep their way up her lean sides, staring hard at him from under his own wide brows before turning their broadening shoulders away, kicking at sticks as they head for the fields. That husband she finally took hovers pale as a sycamore in the shadowy woods surrounding Miller’s quarters, watching Wash go.
Wash traces the lines connecting Vesta’s name to those of each of their boys, pausing under each one long enough for Pallas to say the name. Edward, Sunday and then Wash. Each name followed by a series of numbers. Their dates of birth.
He shakes his head. All that life shrunk down into these marks on a page. His life. Their lives. He works to breathe, trying to expand his chest against this steady weight of written words wanting to press him into a smaller space than he can fit. Trying to shrink him. Him and his. All of them.
Words are not enough. There is not room in any one name for all the life it holds. Makes him glad he never learned to read. Never learned to squeeze his world down into these spidery little shapes that can’t hold nothing.
He does not realize he has spoken this last thought aloud until he feels Pallas’s hand close around the talisman he has finally allowed himself to remake. Tucked so deep in the pocket of his coveralls that the small lump of it rides halfway down the outside of his thigh. Pallas’s fingertips are light and warm around its edges as she presses its small dense weight against his leg.
“That’s all right, you don’t need his book. You made yours already.”
He keeps this last talisman buried out here in this silvery stump where it is safe from Quinn and everybody else, whether white or black. Feels good to put it in his pocket, even if just for this short time they get to spend out here.
Wash can feel it resting in his palm always, whether it’s nestled deep inside denim and cotton or sitting in the dark heart of that pale
stump. He uses his mind’s eye to look at everything he had collected and laid inside this small circle of leather, each item standing for whole worlds without shrinking any of them.
The last of the dirt from old man Thompson’s island, reminding him that life had once been otherwise and so could be again. A thin scrap of pale green cotton covered with his mother’s careful looping stitch, reminding him to keep his mind in mind. He can see her dark fingers against the pale cloth, each stitch echoing her spare words. You got to intend. By this time, Wash knew to add a few strands of gray from Gamma’s tail to the glossy black strands taken from Bolivar’s because he needs her steady endurance as much as he needs her shiny bay colt’s alert lifting stride.
He feels gladness rise up in him. He has finally managed to find the willingness to return to everything Mena taught him. How to choose what to use, how to shroud each element with prayers, how to breathe his spirit into them before wrapping the leather tight and stitching it closed with bright red string. How to lead this last talisman into understanding itself as a piece of him. How to soak it with spirits sprayed with his own breath from his own warm mouth, energizing it enough to watch over him. All that knowing lies tucked into this small dark bundle, pushed down deep inside his pocket then cupped in Pallas’s palm pressing against his thigh to remind him. His own book.
He closes the pale pages of Richardson’s book, leaving its dull brick red covers to sit heavy in Pallas’s hands so he can stand and stretch. The wind passes through the trees as he unhooks his coveralls to let them drop then steps out of them and into the water. Pallas watches the water climb his legs and then his broad back. She knows how a long swim helps him calm down. Helps him put everything back where it belongs.
While he is gone, Pallas pores over each broad page full of women and children. Going in close for the details then trying to stand back to see the whole picture clear enough to hold it. Yes, yes, yes. Just like she had thought. Dempsey is Wash’s. And Willis and Solomon. Charity’s last two boys and Miranda’s first three girls.
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