Wash

by Margaret Wrinkle

  Still, sitting there listening is not too bad for her in some kind of way. Despite the fact there are plenty of other folks she could be helping, people who are still living instead of lying here trying to die, Pallas reminds herself that shepherding somebody out of this world, even this man, is doing something too. Besides, Richardson seems so lost he makes her feel found and she likes thinking about the past. She misses it and the people in it. As exasperating as he can be, this old man is one of the last ones around who remember most of what she remembers. He even knew Phoebe.

  It makes her smile to think about Wash having to put up with him. And back when he was worse. Much worse. Lord have mercy. She can see Wash sitting there in that barn, leaning his back against the wall, twirling his piece of straw, sitting just as still as he was lying in his grave, with Richardson’s words pouring over him, rising up around him till he has to swim through them, making him feel lucky that Mena taught him how. Richardson talked so much, Wash said seemed like he could float in it. Just like those waves.

  Sometimes Richardson will get to talking about his lines. Horses. Hounds. Negroes. All the lines he has made. Their fineness. Their lasting quality.

  Pallas listens closely to this part because she was only able to look at that book for a little while before Wash burnt it up. All of it gone before she’d had time to get everything nailed down good in her mind’s eye. She is glad of the chance to sit there by Richardson’s bed, dipping her washcloth and wringing it out to lay it on his forehead, listening to him shape his mouth around all those words, all those names of all those women she knew, all those names of all those babies she had pulled into this world, with all of it leading back to Wash, coming together in Wash, passing through Wash as through the eye of a needle and then opening back out again on the far side of him into a giant shimmering net, linking him to all those who had come before him and who would come after him. His mamma and his daddy and their mammas and their daddies and cousins and uncles and grands and great grands, with her being the only one living and breathing and walking in this particular world who knows about all of them for sure.

  Just like Wash said, if you’ve got any kind of thin skin, you can feel all these spirits hovering all around you. Everybody who has been here and gone. But it is harder to get the details without somebody to tell you. And you need the details. Who’s who. What they had looked like, how they had talked and walked and laughed.

  With Wash’s people, she’d never seen any of them with her own eyes except for Mena, and neither had Wash, but he laid them into her mind as clear as a picture, just like his mamma had laid them in his. That auntie of his daddy’s with the big front teeth, a rawboned lanky woman with a kind of a donkey laugh, her head thrown back and her hand slapping down. Those pictures have been laid well enough in Pallas’s mind till she can recognize people she’s never even met and she has the sense to thank God for that.

  Same with Richardson. She had sat there with him while his daddy died, and then his son too, and now she sits here next to him as he gets ready to go. She knows he does not want to go like his daddy did. Struggling and afraid. An orphan all over again. She can see it starting to dawn on him that he has already spent too much of his life that way and this should be different. He wants to go calm.

  When the flu comes back, this time Richardson knows it’s going to take him and he’s glad. He lies there in his bed by the window, resting his eyes on Pallas and she lets him. Sitting there in the rocker right by his knee, looking out the same window but at a different angle. Their fields of vision overlap. Nothing left to say. Feels like days pass that way but it’s really only two. So peaceful and quiet between the coughing.

  Richardson has her call Emmaline’s youngest grandson. Nelson is just a little older than Lucius was when he died and almost as good a draftsman as William had been at that age. Nelson brings a pad of paper because Richardson has had him draw designs out for him before. Says he has a good eye.

  He tells the boy pine. A pine box is what he wants and this is how he wants it. Simple and plain. And the headstone plain too. No epitaph. Just the dates, under his name. Under the trees. Near his brother David and next to Lucius, leaving room for his wife and the rest of them.

  Nelson draws it all out for him. The coffin, the headstone, even the trees. Richardson nods, pleased, and falls back asleep. He wakes to cough and then sleeps again. Pallas dozes in her chair and Nelson snores softly where he sits on an old trunk, leaning asleep against the wall.

  In the bustle of activity surrounding Richardson’s last bout of coughing early that next morning, there is confusion. Mary rushes in, finally able to take over from Pallas now that Richardson can no longer intervene. As she jerks on a choking Richardson, trying to lift him so he can breathe, she sends Nelson out of the room in a rush. The small notepad full of his drawings falls behind the trunk where he’d been sitting when he fell asleep the night before.

  Pallas knows from the way Richardson pulls against Mary’s arm and looks over toward her that he wants Pallas to make Mary lay him back down on the bed and let him go, like they did his father. But Mary won’t have it. Pallas stands back by the wall holding his gaze until it’s over because that is what she can do.

  Death always comes as a surprise. So much happens so fast and yet each single day stretches endlessly. Cassius sits with his mother, writing out an inventory of the estate so debts can be paid, credits collected and taxes determined. Together they parcel out what goes to whom. Land and lots, furniture, books, animals, farm equipment, negroes. What and who will be given to which family member, who will be sold, and who will be hired out to provide income for the rest, especially Mary Patton. Then they have the big fancy funeral Richardson no longer wanted.

  Cassius runs the place with Quinn at his right hand. After one mojo incident too many, they decide to dig up what they had always assumed was just trash piled up under those first cabins Richardson built. They send everybody to the fields for the day and wonder why they linger.

  Before the sun has even started down from noon, Cassius and Quinn find stones, bones and shells. Even knives and one old gun. Everybody denies knowing anything, but here’s the proof Quinn never could find for Richardson, lying right underfoot all this time, buried safe as a secret where he had never thought to look.

  Cassius starts that same day, burning down the old to rebuild his way. One cabin at a time. Each raised off the ground on its own four blocks. He tells each family to sleep in the barn for the week, then keep that new cabin clean. Says if he can’t see daylight under the stairs, he’ll burn it down again, no matter who’s inside.

  He tells the swelling ranks of abolitionists to come and see for themselves. Conditions are much improved. After having seen what ambivalence had done to both his father and his brother William, Cassius will have none of it. The young slaveholders of his generation do not remember the window that opened during and after the Revolution. They know nothing about some Founding Fathers’ ill fated attempts to stamp out the trade and they care even less. After faltering for years, slavery takes the bit in its teeth and runs.

  It will be the buying and selling of negroes that finally energizes the town of Memphis. The growth in cotton production will drive the prices for negroes so high that Nathan Bedford Forrest will become a Memphis millionaire before he ever signs up to fight in the Civil War. While Richardson died thinking his dream of a city high on the bluffs of the broad Mississippi River was a dismal failure, William will live long enough to wish it had been.

  ∞

  As the years pass, Pallas looks for Wash coming up in his children and she finds them around her wherever she goes. The ones who can listen, she tells them all about him. So some of those children grown into old people will have a dim remembrance of this pale thin woman laying her cool hands on them and telling them about their daddy.

  “Thick and heavy as wood and burning just as clear as that fire right there.”

  The two boys sitting there in her cabin loo
k at her and then at each other, still suspicious because they have different mammas. But something about the look coming across her face while she’s telling them, like she’s barely in the room, like she’s still looking this man in the face she’s telling them about, something about the way she’s seeing him so clear convinces them she’s telling the truth. And somehow they know to take that truth, awkward as it is, and tuck it away deep inside. And they know not to ask their mammas about it, or their daddies, whom they look nothing like.

  She takes the hand of the taller quiet one named Horace, turning it over and then back again, gently splaying the fingers out then touching her palm to his palm.

  “Yep, you got his hands with those long squared off fingers.”

  And the younger one named Daniel starts asking what did I get, what did I get? She takes his chin in her hand, turning his earnest little face to hers and looking into it hard, then smiling to say you got his eyes with those thick brows so broad across your forehead like wings, and those dark dark eyes that let you fall right inside. And those lashes curled back and tangled, she murmurs to herself as she turns away, like it hurts a little.

  Some of his children choose not to believe her. They go running back to their mammas, one of whom comes storming into Pallas’s yard, jerking at her skirt and twitching mad about how come Pallas don’t know how to leave well enough alone. And Pallas looks right at her, saying now come on, Harriet, you know as well as I do, anything can happen on any day and we got a lot we need to put inside those little minds. No harm in starting early and you know it.

  “You want to go on lying when they already know they ain’t their daddy’s sons, shooting up past their sisters and brothers and dark like that, you go ahead. Why the hell you think they came to me in the first place? It’s their own sisters and brothers shutting em out, calling em names, and all the while wondering if you are a whore.

  “No need to tell the whole story, but I sure as hell won’t watch his children wander this earth without giving em nothing. Not even one thing to hold on to. I’m giving em whatever they want, just as soon as they start asking for it. And I’m going to keep on giving it, as long as they keep asking, and as long as there is breath in me. Now get out of my yard.”

  One day she comes upon young Earnest in Miller’s barn, staring up at one old gelding hanging his long lean face over the stall door. She tells the boy all about how his daddy was good with horses, the ease he had with them, and the way they came to him and stood so close. She sees Earnest’s face shine with the wonder of learning about his daddy as he scratches an itchy spot on the gelding’s throat until his big bay head hangs almost down to the dirt. Earnest loves hearing this secret said out loud and Pallas loves watching him being his daddy without even trying.

  They all carry some trace of Wash, no matter who they came from. Sometimes Mena, but mostly Wash. Some little hint in the shape of a face or a look in the eye. Maybe just the mannerisms. That dead on, straight ahead way he had. Wade right on through the water to get to the other side. No looking for a boat or some other way across because that’s just a waste of time. Besides, he was always strong enough.

  When Pallas tells her stories about Wash to his children, she gets to be with him herself. She describes how mean he acted when she first met him, how he liked to have bit her head off when she took him that first supper.

  Then she tells them how sick he was and how she held the hand of this big strong mean man. Pulled him back from where he was staring straight into death’s door and how he turned out to be a real sweet and tenderhearted man underneath it all. And how he had returned the favor by bringing her back into the world of the living.

  They asked her were you sick too? And she said not exactly baby, not exactly, but I was a little lost and he came and found me.

  It would be easier for her if Wash hadn’t burnt the book but she understands why he did it. And maybe it’s better this way. Who knows? There’s no telling. But at least she had seen it all written down. She had run her eyes and her hands over and over those names as she sat there snugged between Wash’s legs wrapped around her, holding the book open in her lap and leaning her back up against his chest, his chin resting on her shoulder as he looked at it with her. She had felt him crying too, jerking with sobbing but quiet, and holding on to her as tight as if he were being pulled hard downstream.

  They are lucky to have you, is what she kept saying to him.

  “They are lucky. Just look at em, coming up so strong and beautiful. They got you and they got your mamma and your daddy and your careful uncle and your sweet granddaddy. And the scary one too.

  “They got all y’all, and it was me who pulled em into this world. They’ll be all right. They’ll be more than all right. They will shine. They are coming up all over and they will shine. Don’t you worry, I will tell them. The ones who can hear me, I’ll tell them, and even if I can’t get through, they’ll find a way to know. You’ll see, they will know.”

  It is winter again and the trees around Pallas’s little house are bare. Leafy bunches of squirrels’ nests catch her eye where they make knots high among the latticework of bare branches. Richardson has been dead ten years and Wash nearly twelve but Pallas somehow looks the same. She didn’t get sold and she still lives in this cabin because Richardson wrote it in his will, just like he told her he would.

  A flock of blackbirds arrives in a cloud like music then settles in the treetops, falling quiet and disappearing into the stillness of its roost, but only for a moment before some internal disagreement, or maybe a hawk, sends them on again. All those small single bickering birds pour from their separate roosts, woven by movement back into one living breathing thing.

  In that moment of seeing them fall in and out of moving together, Pallas knows, as sure and clear as a footprint, how things are and have always been. She sees that all of them, her and Wash, his mamma and Rufus and Phoebe, and even all those white folks, good and bad, here and gone, all of them are and have always been part of this one living breathing thing, moving through a time and a space bigger than any of them ever knew.

  And yes, there are moments when they fall out of moving together into the stillness of their separate roosts, moments when all you can hear is their aloneness and their apartness and their bickering, but at the same time as all of that, and just as true, is their capacity to pour out of their separateness back into this swooping graceful oneness where each of them knows somehow when to glide and when to bank.

  Pallas has felt this knowing before and then lost it because it comes and goes. It never seems to stay. She has had glimmers before, sitting beside the water sometimes, but it has taken her until she is old and stiff and alone to see it clear.

  As this clarity presses then burns across her forehead and at the base of her throat with what Phoebe used to call the annointing, she can see Binah placing Wash’s outstretched palm just there at the base of her own throat until he feels the heat pulsing under his fingertips. Pallas touches the same spot, just below the small hollow Phoebe had filled with white clay.

  Never mind that Pallas was not there on that day to see what Binah did with her own eyes because now she knows this feeling for herself. She can finish the story Wash started for her, just like Wash learned to finish the stories Mena started for him, saying to himself, oh, now I see, this is what she must have meant, all full of that feeling of the world falling back into place.

  Pallas remembers how easily she used to move into this knowing, most often by herself as she walked through the woods, disappearing into the green walls of snaking leaves, but also sometimes with Wash, walking out into the soft dark water of their summer pond, feeling its rise on her skin.

  She can feel both his stories and hers, everything they told one another, playing and pulling around her like the current in the river running below the bluff where her little cabin sits, even now. She sees the faces of so many of his children who came to her because she alone chose to stand inside her knowing and let it a
nchor her.

  And she remembers falling out of it too. Days when the interlocking patterns connecting everything seem to have faded into gone, leaving this world drained empty of all the meaning it had once held.

  What Pallas understands now, finally, is that this knowing leaves in order to grant you the chance to call it back. To take hold of it again. It falls away to give you the joy of its return. Sometimes this knowing is given but most times it is made.

  The side of the porch presses hard and steady against her back as she sits watching. She feels her heart swell and contract right along with that flock breathing in the sky and she knows, just as sure as the shape of her own hands, we are all of us one thing. All here, all connected, all the time, regardless.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Corinna Barsan, Elisabeth Schmitz, Morgan Entrekin, the whole Grove/Atlantic team, Marly Rusoff, Beverly Swerling, Stuart Horwitz, Rob Spillman, and Elise Cannon.

  Thanks also to my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, for being such a thorough teacher; to my parents for protecting my imagination by getting rid of the television and for making sure that I got outside of the South enough to see it clearly, even as they taught me to value my heritage; to Ida Mae Lawson and her descendants for helping me learn to hear more of the notes; to Tot Goodwin for sharing his graceful connection to the natural world; to my former students in both Birmingham and the West Bank for modeling bravery and integrity; to Lonnie Holley, Jimmie Lee Sudduth and all the visionary Alabama artists who inspire me; to Patricia, Jeannie, Maple, and Helen for guiding my understanding of the bigger picture; to Flight of the Mind, Hedgebrook, and Mesa Refuge for giving me space and time; to the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Southern Collection at the Birmingham Public Library, and interpreters at historic sites throughout the South for all the various ways they seek to address the thorny issue of interpreting our collective past.