by Mark Slouka
I jolted up, dragging my half-sleeping brother to a sitting position. It seemed to be coming from the boys’ bedroom. Wrapping a blanket around ourselves we ran upstairs, following the lamplight, where we found Addy (her sister next to her) holding Christopher by the ear, shaking his still-damp britches in his face. It was just after midnight. Shadows leaped and shrank against the wall. I could hear the baby crying. Down the hall I could see the children’s heads, like mushrooms on a tree, protruding from their doorways.
She had come to look in on them, she explained, and found him gone. Nearly frantic with worry, she had been at the point of waking up the household when she had heard the back door open and seen him creep up the stairs. Unable to think what it might mean, she had determined to wait till morning to confront him, but had found herself too agitated to sleep. There was no time like the present, after all. She would raise no liars, she said now, lifting him up till he yelped. No, sir. There would be no liars in the Bunker house.
That was when my brother entered into it. He had counseled against it, he said. He had argued against it, not once, but a dozen times. It was unnatural. A corrupting influence. But I wouldn’t listen.
Addy turned to me, still holding Christopher by the ear. For a moment she seemed to be trying to understand what she had just heard. “You knew about this?” she asked, in a strangely calm tone of voice, disbelieving.
“I did,” I said. “I’ve known about it all along.”
She shook her head as though it were a sieve and she was trying to sift some essence from this bit of information. “You … you’re saying you knew this boy was spending his nights lazing about with niggers, and you didn’t say anything to me?” she said.
“It was all I could do to keep from saying something myself,” said my brother.
“I think you should resist a bit longer, brother,” I said. I turned to Addy. “The boy’s been spending a few evenings by the river. Swimming. Fishing. I saw no reason to make a fuss. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You didn’t want to worry me?” She adjusted her grip, cranking him up like a foul-hooked fish. “It didn’t occur to you …”
“It occurred to me,” I said, feeling myself growing angry. “I just didn’t do anything about it.”
She smiled. “Oh, I see. You didn’t think that maybe—”
“Why don’t you put the boy down,” I said.
She stared at me a moment, then laughed, incredulous. “What?”
“Let go of his ear.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
I could see her lip beginning to tremble. Her chin looked like a peach pit now. I didn’t care. I took a step forward, jerking my brother along.
“Oh, yes you will,” I said.
“I’m his mother …” she began.
“I’m not going to say it again,” I said quietly.
“Fine,” she said, almost whispering, fighting hard to keep her features from rearranging themselves against her will. “Fine. If you’re bound and determined to make a liar out of him, go ahead.” And letting go of Christopher’s ear (who sank down to the ground, crying less from pain than from what was happening around him), she turned around and walked away, her sister behind her.
For a few seconds the only sounds in the world were their steps on the wood and the creak of the lamp, swinging on its handle. “Go to bed,” I called into the growing dark, trying hard to sound like I always did. Uncle Chang. Father. I reached down and lifted Christopher up by the arm. “Come on,” I said, “stand up now.” He wrapped his arms around me, crying as I hadn’t seen him cry in a long time, and buried his head in my chest. He’d grown so tall. I petted his head, feeling him shake against my ribs. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It was my fault as well.”
My brother sighed. “This is what comes—”
“Don’t say anything, brother,” I said. “Don’t say anything at all.” And he didn’t.
I felt sorry afterwards—something I’m good at. This was my wife, I told myself. The mother of my children. Someone who loved them as much as I did. I had never threatened her before; never raised a hand against her. That was changed now. Though we would both do our best to pretend otherwise in the weeks and months to come, something had been broken between us.
But it couldn’t have been helped. For an instant, as Christopher had turned in her grip, trying not to cry, his eyes had caught the lantern’s light. I knew it was nothing—just the wetness in his eyes; a matter of perspective, nothing more. But in that moment, so help me God, they had looked blind to me, and before I knew what was happening I was wading in to save him—this one child of mine who probably needed saving least—from the one person in the world he least needed saving from.
And yet here’s the thing. Though I knew all these things to be true, I also knew that given the same situation, I would do it again.
VI.
Unlike things, the primers say, cannot be summed: The smell of sour milk. The taste of whiskey. The screaming of children playing in the wind.
How do you sum a life? You don’t. You don’t even try. You leave it as it is: irreducible, ungraspable. A torrent of things, of days—unlike, often unlovely—cutting a channel through your heart. The faces of your children, still red from the womb. The ripeness of the nursery on still winter mornings. The hoarfrost in the parlor windows, shot through with small oval thumbprints. The garden, that one briefseason, burgeoning madly as though under a spell, bowing down with fruit. You don’t add these things. How could you?
And yet you try. You must. One possum, hissing sheepishly, hunched forever on the crossbeam of a porch. Wind. The shadows of small clouds hurrying across the fields. An open door at the back of a house—like a well-lit painting at the end of a long corridor. In it, two boys, already far off, are caught mid-leap, disappearing over the edge of the bank.
Loss, loss. How to hold against this steady seepage, this never-ending subtraction? Go ahead: Herd them together, make a pile of them—the perfect days, the hours of life, the moments of utter happiness, brought on by nothing more than the smell of tobacco and the warmth of your coat on a cool night. A small joke, perhaps. Remember your son standing mid-calfin the stream that day, half-buried in orange butterflies. Add your daughter, watching him. Now recall the crawdad you noticed passing by his legs. You could see it there, below that air-clear current spreading and respreading itself between the banks, hurrying over and around the brown, furred rocks … And for just a moment, everything held. Everything was right. And then, in a puff of silt, it was gone.
Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.
You fool! What are these things you hoard, compared to their leaving? To your father, trying to smile while dying against a bamboo wall. To your lover—lost. To a baby toddling across a wooden floor while her nurse, a child herself, stares out the window and, lulled by the fire in the hearth behind her, dreams of boys …
VII.
Did I know he was teaching him to read those long summer afternoons he was gone? I did not. Am I sorry for it now? No, I am not. I am sorry for many things—that is not one of them.
Christopher did what he would do. He always had. And having decided, for some reason forever unknown to me, that he would teach a slave to read—a decision still astounding to me for its implicit anger, its utter disregard for the laws of the day—he proceeded to do just that. Perhaps he thought I knew. Or that I had given him tacit permission, somehow, by defending his nights by the river. I doubt it. I doubt he would have cared.
I still find myself wondering, at times, how long it took them. How many weeks and months of days, the two of them holed up in some deadfall with a view of the woods below, always alert for movement—any movement, for black or white were nearly equal threat to them now—Christopher pointing, saying, “Naw, it can’t be that, ’cause there’s an e at the end of it,” first scraping the words in the dirt with a stick, then unfold
ing newspaper pages smuggled out in his boots, smoothing them against his knee. I can see them snorting with laughter (“That ain’t ‘Kan’s-ass,’ you donkey. You just forget the other a. I don’t know why”), picking out the words together as the first few drops smack the dust, the blackberry leaves, pock the page itself …
I missed it all. All those years he worked in our house (for I brought him and his mother in from the fields the week after his father died), I had no idea he could read the books on our table. Even now I find it a bit disconcerting, just as someone speaking a foreign language for privacy might find it disconcerting to discover that the people he had assumed were ignorant of his meaning had in fact understood every word. Moses never let on, never gave himself away. And Christopher never told me. Until the day, nearly five years later, when I received a letter stamped with the circular seal of the Union Army and signed by one “Private Moses Bunker,” I had no idea.
I had excuses, distractions. That was the year—the last, before the world accelerated like a runaway cart—when the rains didn’t come. The ponds shrank, the lettuces bolted, the corn burned. The mud banks of the river widened, growing out of the sluggish flow, then cracked into brown continents. Already you could feel the changes stirring in the land, hear the first high wind. We had no idea of what was coming, of course, no way of knowing that for the rest of our lives a listing of the years that followed—1857, ’58, ’59, ’60—would bring to mind a child counting out the distance between the lightning and the thunder; and yet it seems to me now we must have known it, must have sensed it in our bones.
Day by day my brother grew more taciturn, more irritating. Morning after morning—or so it seemed—we’d sit sweating behind that damned table while he (a man born on a bamboo mat!) imbibed the Holy Spirit, battening like a tick at my expense. I found it difficult to talk to him now. Though nothing dramatic had happened (it was mostly a matter of silences: head shakings and pursed lips, glances averted in disgust or disapproval …) I could feel him growing away from me. Confused and resentful (the thought that he should be backing away from me, after all I had borne for him!), I quite naturally took every opportunity to puncture his sanctimoniousness, using whatever weapon came to hand.
That was the year the bright leaf tobacco barely saved us from ruin, the year Lewis died. I was sorry about Lewis. I still am. We had our troubles (just weeks before his death he had quarreled with us about getting his son a knife, as though we were a mail-order catalog he could order from whenever he pleased), and yet I see now that, just like certain other members of his race, he had about him a quality that set him apart from his kind. I can’t say that I liked him, but I was sorry when he died. So much so, in fact, that the week after we brought him back from Bellefonte in the back of the wagon (he was buried in the Negro graveyard off Sorghum Road) I interrupted my brother’s studying one warm October afternoon to inform him that I had decided to bring Berry and Moses into the house with us.
I knew it would not be easy.
For a few minutes, as we sat there on the porch, I tried to figure out a way of making my case in the least objectionable manner possible. I couldn’t do it. More importantly, I discovered I didn’t want to. The more I thought about it, in fact, the more I resented having to justify myself to my own brother. I looked at him. There he sat, with his hairy ears and his reproving look, looking like some wandering apostle sniffing the air for sin, while I twisted myself into knots trying to figure out a way of asking his approval for something I had every right to do on my own. It was absurd. To hell with him.
“I’ve been thinking about bringing Berry and Moses into the house,” I said, plunging in. “It seems to me Aunt Grace could use the help.”
“Oh?” he said, without raising his eyes or his finger from the book. “Have you noticed her falling off from her duties?”
“It’s obvious she’s getting on,” I said. “The house is too much for her.”
“Is it?” He turned the page.
“I think it is,” I said. “Besides, we have to think about the future. Better now, it seems to me, than when she’s too frail to properly train her replacements.” My brother said nothing, letting me run on. I could hear my own voice—false and ingratiating.
“I’ve made up my mind,” I said, feeling myself growing hot in the face.
He smiled, pulled the tassel to mark his place, closed the book. Something about the movement—its deliberateness, I suppose, as though he were a schoolteacher dealing with a stubborn child—infuriated me. “I believe I still have some say in these matters,” he said, looking off across the fields.
“Some.”
“Be so kind as to hear me out, then.”
I waved my hand. He paused, while I marveled at the absurd formality that had recently crept into his speech.
“It’s inappropriate. She’s needed in the fields. Trust me, brother, she’ll be best off among her own kind, not separated off from them in a world she doesn’t understand. Not to mention that—”
“Are you finished?” I said.
“Would it matter?” he said, stung.
“Probably not.”
He stopped. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I never expected you to take anyone else’s opinions into account.”
“Really? Why did you offer them, then?”
“Because I foolishly thought I could talk some sense into you. I should have known the time for that was long past.”
“Oh, but how Christian of you to try anyway, brother.”
He was trembling now. “You’re an arrogant and selfish man.”
“And you’re a prig and a fool.”
“Don’t bait me, brother. I won’t stand for it.”
I laughed. “Bait you? You’re a fish on a plate.”
He stood up abruptly, jerking me to my feet.
“Enough reading for today?” I said, smiling.
For a moment I thought he was going to hit me. A long moment passed. From inside the house came the quick clanging of pots. A cow lowed in the distance. “I don’t care what you say,” he said at last, quietly. “They’re not coming into my house.”
So they came into mine, instead. Over the next four years, for exactly two weeks out of each month, Berry would help Aunt Grace about the house—washing, mending, spinning flax into linen, preparing the midday meal out back by the old brick oven—while Moses would do whatever needed doing; for the other two they would stay on with the others under the general supervision of our overseer, Tim McDaniel (though I often thought they could have managed just as well or better alone) keeping up the house for our return. I never regretted it. Unlike Lewis, who could be difficult, both mother and son generally knew their place, and never took advantage of the good fortune that had come their way.
But though the obvious success of the arrangement should have brought some peace to our affairs, it did not. The original argument covered over but didn’t heal. How could it—when every two weeks one or the other of us would be forcibly reminded of the limits of his domain? Though we had always deferred to each other to some extent when in each other’s homes, the gesture had always been voluntary. It was so no longer. Submission had become a requirement, a mandate neither of us hesitated to impose on the other.
And as the months passed, we expanded it joyfully, allowing it to encompass nearly every part of the day. When in Eng’s house now, I would be forced to retire early because he preferred it, to walk when he wanted to, to sit for hours on end while he made his way for the umpteenth time through Charity Barnum’s Bible, refusing to admit he was tired even though it had been an hour since he had turned a page and I had been watching him fighting sleep the entire time—his body sagging, then jerking awake—just to spite me. I responded in kind, fighting to stay awake into the early hours when we came to Mount Airy, moving about to wake him if he started to nod off before me. I canceled our Bible mornings, swore as colorfully as I knew how, attempted, at every turn, to anticipate his wants, so as to know how best to frus
trate him. Now, if there was anything to be done at Mount Airy, it was done my way; if there was any disagreement—over anything, really—my decision was final.
None of this was ever addressed directly. We remained superficially polite. If you wouldn’t mind. If it’s not too much trouble. Certainly, brother, have it your way. We smiled. Whatever we endured, we endured in silence, unwilling to give the other the satisfaction of seeing our irritation. Now again, for the first time since childhood, our bond became an issue between us—the most convenient thorn with which to torment the other. Bit by bit, a lifetime of small but necessary accommodations was abandoned. The signal before sitting up in bed. The willingness to get up immediately when nature called the other. The thousand small adjustments of weight and balance that made bending, or turning, or reaching for something, less difficult for each of us.
Now, if my brother reached for something to his right, I held my weight back just enough to force him to move me around. If I turned to speak to someone as we walked down the street, he would jerk me back slightly, making me stop and back up, instead of coming up ahead. And so on. Gone, seemingly overnight, was the coordination that had always struck outsiders as very nearly supernatural, the unthinking alignment that had allowed us to swim and run and fight, that had saved our lives that day on the Sachem when, running at full speed from one of the mess boys who delighted in chasing us about the deck, we had suddenly seen the open hold yawning at our feet and, too late to stop or swerve or signal, had instinctively lifted off at precisely the same moment—I off my left leg, Eng off his right—and cleared the pit by so little, with only the front of our bare feet hitting the wood, that had it not been for our momentum, which threw us tumbling across the deck, we would never have made it. Now we twitched and lurched about like men continually hitching their pants or getting at some hidden itch or suffering from some strange nervous disorder. It’s fine. It’s nothing. I’m sorry, brother, did you mean to turn?