God's Fool

by Mark Slouka

  And now, suddenly, a whisper after dinner, a smile over cards. A willingness, if not to be pleased, then at least to humor my desires. I was relieved to learn that, despite the fallow periods that had extended, by slow degrees, from weeks to months, I had not grown enfeebled in the act of love, and though Eng’s face, where I could make it out in the moonlight, invariably carried the expression of a man waiting for a carriage, Addy’s look of surprise at my youthful vigor (the effect of her pleasure diluted, somewhat, by the tonic of her amusement) more than made up for it. On a particularly dark night, in the midst of our passion, I felt both her hands suddenly press into my backside, pulling me down to her. And though it later occurred to me that she might simply have intended to accelerate the crisis and have an end (which was precisely what happened), I’d never known such boldness in our marriage, and basked in the glow of it for days.

  Weather doesn’t come from the west, Gideon liked to say; it comes from the bedroom. And though I recall arguing the point—unhappy days can cloud the mind—I knew even then it was true, having sensed for myself how very sweet a drizzling March in Paris might be. The general calm that spread from the bedroom now seemed to cover the entirety of our days.

  In the evenings after supper the younger children would gather around (Nannie almost always on my lap, Christopher, though quite a big boy now, tight against my shoulder), and Eng and I would spin tales of Siam: of ageless tortoises and man-thick pythons whose skin flashed blue as a butterfly’s wing, of raging typhoons on the Andaman Sea and the light that shone from the skin of the Emerald Buddha the day we were brought—a fishmonger’s sons—to meet Rama III in the Audience Hall in Bangkok, and on and on with only the clock in the parlor keeping the time until half the children were sleeping and the others on their way. At some point, often toward the end of a story, Addy and I would look at each other across the heads of our children and our look would hold for a moment, and then the king would clap his pudgy hands, the tiger vanish in the ruined wall, and the four of us would carry them off, one by one, to bed.

  XI.

  I still see him in the big dirt square between the barn and the smokehouse, pushing a wheelbarrow heaped high with wood. From around the corner of the shed comes the short sharp crack of a log being cleaved in two, followed by the double thump of the halves falling to the dirt.

  “Good morning, Lewis,” said my brother that morning. “Firewood’s coming along, I see.”

  “We’re makin’ it come along, suh,” he said. “It don’t want to go.”

  My brother smiled. “I’m sure it doesn’t. How much have you got?”

  “Three walls to the eave, ’nother half done.” He ran the sleeve of his shirt over his gleaming forehead. “I got to watch them boys, Mistah Eng,” he said, not smiling. “They get up a good head of steam, they won’t be a tree left standin’ ’tween here ’n’ Richmond.” As though to make the point, two axes now came down at once, followed by a third. Behind them, I remember, I could hear the dry whip, whip, whip of the women threshing the oats. A baby started crying. The sound of threshing, steady as crickets, diminished slightly. An axe struck and hit.

  Raising the barrow, his forearms ridged and hard, he leaned his weight into it and the wheel began to turn. We watched him pilot his burden across the broken ground, then disappear—first barrow and wood, then straight back and bent knees, then flapping left shoe—around the edge of the tobacco shed he had built the season before. Less than three weeks later he was dead.

  It would be unfair to say that our troubles began that November, or that Lewis’s death, in one blow, destroyed the understanding my brother and I had built up over a lifetime. But it wouldn’t be wrong, either. Though it left the house standing, it exposed the crack beneath the rug, the weakened joists and rotten beams we had always known were there, forced a reckoning that might otherwise never have come.

  It was our fault, mine most of all. With most of the cotton ginned and pressed and the tobacco safe in the sheds for a week, we had felt, when we heard Price still had half his crop in the field and only six slaves to cut and rack it, that we could safely loan him Lewis for a time. It was already late in the season. We’d had fires in the parlor for a week. Every morning I expected one of the children to come running in with a thin pane of ice from the trough.

  I had always disliked Price. A big man saddled with a small man’s soul, still uneasy with himself at an age when most men have grown comfortable with their shortcomings, he had compensated by cultivating an array of tics and mannerisms that always appeared, with amazing consistency, just slightly off the mark. Leaning in a doorway, he’d appear to be imitating how other men leaned; bursting into laughter, he would give the impression of practicing something he had admired in someone else. Trapped by his own character, he’d lash out when nothing called for it, just as a dog with three legs will bite before a whole one does. He had cheated us twice. More competent than some, hardly a fool, he knew how to ingratiate himself with others, stroke and salve—and cut from below as necessary.

  If it had been up to me, I would have let him sink. It was Eng who noted that nearly everyone—Smythe, Stoneman, even poor, hapless Benner—was offering to send a slave of their own to help; Eng who pointed out that Seward had mentioned Price that very Sunday in his sermon on Christian charity; Eng who reminded me, finally, that it hadn’t been that long since the citizens of Wilkes County had smashed all the windows in Judge Yates’s house on hearing that his daughters were engaged to a pair of carnival freaks from the Orient. Doing nothing, he argued, would hurt us, not Price.

  But though the initial arguments were Eng’s, I was the one who suggested sending Lewis—the one man, by his nature, least capable of enduring what would come his way. Having made the decision, I felt we might as well offer the best we had. No one could help noticing that we’d sent the best; Price, having stolen from us, would feel the sting of our generosity the most. As for Lewis, I hardly gave him a thought. I might as well have hung him myself from the cross beam in the barn.

  We found him and Moses that Sunday afternoon squatting in the small dirt yard between the cabins, whittling new legs for the three broken chairs that stood leaning against the wall under a half-opened window. It was a fine day, yellow and soft, redolent with fall. A slight breeze, the timid forerunner of winter’s gales, moved now and again through the thinning grass.

  I could see them talking as we approached, looking up from their hands for a moment or two, then back with a shrug or a nod, Lewis gesturing with the hand that held the knife as if cutting the world into bits of field and wagon and wall. Even at that distance you could tell they were father and son, and I remember wondering, idly, what it was that made that link so obvious, and how odd it was that with some—a man and wife, for example—the bond was visible at fifty yards, while with others you could talk all evening and never know.

  A woman’s laughter cut off as we entered the yard.

  They both stood when they saw us coming, swatting at the shavings that clung to their pants like bits of curling paper. We explained our business. Lewis said nothing. Behind him the wind ruffled through red-tipped ivy crawling along the sill.

  It was only for three or four days at most, we told him. We had spoken to Price. He would be treated well, as one of ours.

  “I know Mr. Price,” he said.

  “You should get along just fine, then,” said my brother, misunderstanding.

  He nodded slowly, then turned to his son. “Go on, boy,” he said, nodding his head toward the cabin. “I’ll be in in a spell.”

  He waited till Moses had gone, then spoke as calmly as if he were telling us how much work had been done, or asking for boards to fix his roof.

  “I won’t be beat no more. I’m too old for it.”

  “No one’s going to beat you, Lewis,” I said, slightly taken aback by the weariness in his voice. “You have my word.”

  He left the next morning at dawn. We never saw him again. I don’t count the shape
we found bleeding in the dirt by the drying racks. No, the last time I saw him he was squatting against a peeling wall with his son on a November afternoon, talking, as a woman’s laughter carried from one of the back cabins.

  XII.

  We never knew what happened at Bellefonte that night. In the weeks that followed we learned a few things—bits, pieces—not enough. We learned that Price had been driving his slaves ragged trying to make up for his own stupidity. That two had been whipped the week before—Ben, a big, quiet mulatto, just a day earlier. We learned that late that Tuesday night a fight broke out in the clearing behind the drying racks between two big men—Lewis and one of Price’s slaves, a big buck named Joah. That the fight erupted with such ferocity and was over so quickly that Mason, Price’s overseer, hardly knew what was happening before it was done. That Lewis, bleeding from the face, shattered his left arm blocking a short, hard swing with a shovel, and the next thing anyone knew Joah was walking in little squares in the dirt, holding his neck with both hands as if trying to hide Lewis’s tobacco knife buried in his throat. Before anyone had time to react or think, Price was there with the shotgun.

  Lewis had tried to run for home. It was this that troubled me most, I think. That this man, whom I had never known to be afraid of anything, had tried to run. How very afraid he must have been those last few moments, seeing the world unraveling, realizing all he would leave behind.

  I had told him he would be treated well. I’d lied. Holding his useless arm as if cradling a child, Lewis ran for the dark. He’d nearly made it to the edge of the clearing when the buckshot caught him and opened up the back of his head.

  Gideon woke us just before midnight. Even before we climbed off the wagon we could see them in the lamplight, the two of them lying side by side on a gray blanket, Lewis’s arm bent wrong at the elbow, Joah’s head turned to the side as though whispering something to the man who had just killed him. A short distance across the dirt, between the sheds, stood a group of slaves. I recognized the mulatto, Ben. Price was sitting in a rocker on the porch, the gun across his lap.

  “A bad business, Bunker,” he called out. He pointed with the gun. “Your nigger there killed one of my slaves.”

  We squatted down by Lewis’s side. Taking him by the legs and shoulders, we rolled him toward us. I raised the lamp. The entire back of his head—or what should have been the back of his head—was now a sticky mass of dirt and sawdust. His colorless shirt had been pulled halfway down his back; a dozen pink craters in the black skin of his neck, already dried, marked the edge of the pattern. I couldn’t move, or think. I just sat there staring at him, mindlessly stroking his leg as though he were a child in need of comforting. My brother, with some effort, slipped his fingers under Lewis’s head. Turning it slightly, he began to brush at the dirt as though looking for something.

  Embarrassed at this show of emotion, Price rocked in his chair for a few moments, then stood and walked down the porch steps. “He’s dead, Bunker,” he said. “No use in that.”

  “What happened here?” said my brother.

  “Look for yourself. Stuck a knife in his throat. I tried to aim low, but …”

  My brother grasped Lewis’s woolly hair, turned the back of his head to Price. “You took his head off at thirty feet.”

  I could feel the blood pounding in my head like ocean surf. Lewis’s pant leg had pulled up from the shoe. I could see the skin of his calf against the dirt.

  Price smiled. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do, Bunker.”

  “You owe us two thousand dollars,” said Eng evenly.

  Price laughed. “I’ll see you in hell first, you little yellow bastards.”

  “And an apology.”

  Squatting twenty feet away, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm, Price turned to Gideon. “You listening to this?” he asked.

  “Every word,” said Gideon.

  Price shook his head, pretending to control himself. “I’m not an unreasonable man,” he said, standing. “We’re neighbors, after all. And I’ll be the first to say it: Lending me your nigger was a downright Christian thing to do. But look here, Bunker. There’s two niggers dead and we’re even.”

  “Is that right?” said my brother, and in that moment I knew where we were headed.

  “Not a court in the land would see it different. You know that. Hell, at least one of you has to have some sense.”

  Taking a handkerchief out of my pocket I reached over and slipped it, as best I could, under Lewis’s face. We stood up. My hands were shaking so badly I had to make a show of dusting the dirt off my pants.

  “Maybe so,” said Eng, nodding. We started walking toward Price. I could see Gideon straighten from where he’d been leaning against the shed. The slaves, I noticed, were still standing, like so many silhouettes, in the shadow between the sheds. Mason, the overseer, was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m glad you see it that way,” said Price uncertainly. “I’m sorry for it, but there it is.”

  “There it is,” said Eng, extending his hand.

  In all our life together my brother only beat me to a punch once, and this was not that time. A split second before his right landed on Price’s left cheekbone, its twin, my left, landed on his right. He fell like an ox. I kicked the gun, which he’d been holding high on the stock, off to the side, saw Gideon, out of the corner of my eye, stroll over to pick it up.

  We fought as we always had, swinging from the outside, using our inner arms up close to grab or hold or block. Tougher men had fought us and lost. Price, however, was a problem. Scratching and slapping, he tried to claw his way free, then turned and fought like a woman, gouging at our eyes and throats, tearing at our hair, trying to drive a boot or knee between our legs. At one point, hearing my brother scream, I turned to see that Price, with a strange, mewling whine, had sunk his teeth like a dog into my brother’s shoulder. Forcing his head down to keep him from pulling away, I grabbed the spongy mess of his broken nose and he let go. A few seconds later, my brother’s fist took out the teeth that had bitten him.

  It was while we were on the ground that I felt the sudden blow to the back of my head. The world grew silent, as though I were being submerged under water. Clawing my way back to the surface, unable to turn around, I fought on as best I could. A second blow never came.

  I’m not sure we would have stopped had it not been for Gideon. Price hadn’t moved in a while when, as in a dream, I heard a voice saying, “That might do, gentlemen. All good things must end.”

  A hand came down and grabbed me by the elbow. My brother and I staggered to our feet. I felt a strong arm around my waist. Mason, the overseer, was lying on the ground, a piece of stovewood by his side. Gideon’s face drifted briefly into view.

  The porch tilted crazily, then righted itself. My brother, I realized, was holding me up from the other side. “Walk,” he said.

  Lewis and Joah were lying where we’d left them.

  “We can’t …” I began.

  “We can,” said Gideon.

  “No.”

  “All right,” I heard him sigh. “Just get in the goddamn wagon. I’ll get him.”

  It was Gideon who lifted Lewis into the back of the wagon that night with the help of one of the slaves: the same wagon we’d laid him down in twelve years earlier. And fully awake now, the blood and the salt stinging our eyes, we drove him home.

  XIII.

  I gave Moses a white-handled Barlow knife. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. He thanked me nicely enough—he and his mother were in the house by then—and put it away in his overalls pocket.

  He would carry it until May of 1864, when it worked its way through a tear in his pocket and fell, unnoticed, into the corpse-fed grass of the old Chancellorsville battlefield. Finding it missing, he tried looking for it—a white-handled knife would be easy to spot—but found the huge, sweet-smelling field his company had slept on so thickly sown with the dead, the yellowing bones of their toes and the
ir knuckles peeping from the grass, the circlets of their spines protruding from the dirt like half-buried bracelets or burrowing snakes (as though that thousand-acre field were the very coatroom of death), that he gave it up for lost. That afternoon his unit of Grant’s army entered the Wilderness.

  XIV.

  Like the silt that keeps a footprint where the water is slow, the world holds our shape for a time. For days after he died I kept seeing him walking back from the fields or disappearing between the drying sheds. Lewis, it seemed, had occupied more space than I’d known.

  The world is full of omens. Reason blinds us all. The day before he died we had let the hogs into the corn on a still, lowering afternoon just as the sun, disappearing under a lid of clouds, turned the fields of broken stalks, the fence rails, the western walls of the sheds a strange, unearthly orange. The hogs went through the downed corn like fire—rooting, grunting, squealing. I’d seen it before, yet this time—perhaps because of that strange light—there was a madness in it, in the sight of pigs as big as men rooting out moles and mouse nests, crushing tortoises hidden in the stalks, snorting and snuffing through the broken shells … One of the sows grabbed a snake. We watched as she tossed it left and right to break its spine, the snake flailing in her mouth like a long black rope. And I knew—as mother claimed she knew, as the blacks said they knew—that something bad had wormed its way up into the visible world, and would make its presence known.

  A week after we returned home, though I knew it would leave us short in the field, I brought Berry and Moses into the house. My brother argued. We had already lost our best worker, he said. To lose two more was madness. I refused to give in. We argued on, just as we had twice as children, when, unable to walk away from one another, our anger fueled by our proximity, we had fought until we couldn’t move from sheer exhaustion and just lay side by side, sobbing, until we found the strength to stand and walk home.