Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  He’s taken her from me, he said. As surely as I stand here, he’s taken her when she was not his to take. When she was not his at all.

  The grand recital was the next afternoon and we’d spent all week arranging chairs in the courtyard. O we’d strung up bunting and streamers from the balustrades and balconies, from the hallways and doorframes. The whole campus was delightful and effusive, as if it floated within a flowing wind of enchantment. Soft crinoline sheets and votive candles were everywhere so that if you hadn’t set your eyes upon it before, the great cheerfulness of the decorations would have eased your weary heart. All except A.D.’s, of course, whose heart was still black and burning in its leaden pit as he paced and jangled his keychain even after I told him to quit it, that it was over. That hadn’t I told him it would only come to this, to no good from the beginning? Hadn’t I had my misgivings?

  It is not over, he said and turned to me with poison in his throat before storming off, so that I had to follow him to stay his demon mind. I knew where he was headed, and only wondered what I could do to keep the venom inside him, to stop whatever plan he’d set in motion now that he’d come full circle in his mind to this night of fruition.

  The birds, I said, hurrying up behind him. What are you going to do with the birds?

  There was a cry above me in the stairwell, and then a great sundering of wood. When I reached the third floor, A.D. was inside her dorm room holding the birdcage as Ms. Clara May herself looked dumbstruck and incredulous from her bedside as John Hill Carter stood buttoning his shirt.

  Take your hands off them this instant, John Hill said and stepped toward A.D., a half-drunk whiskey bottle in his hand. The brown bottle leaked its rich perfume as he twisted it like so much incense sprinkled about the air. As a few drops caught A.D. on the cheek, he smiled to see John Hill come for him as he’d hoped, because his legs were long and he held one out catching John Hill in the gut.

  John Hill slumped forward with a sound like a gashed tire. His eyes were red and watery as he lurched up trying to grab A.D., but A.D. just laughed and brought the birdcage down on the back of John Hill’s head. As John Hill fell to one knee, the whiskey bottle shattered on the carpet. I knew it, John Hill said, I knew it, as he leaned up and watched as A.D. prepared to bring the birdcage down again on its target. What’d I tell you, Clara May? You give a nigger an inch and he takes the whole world.

  Boys! Boys! Ms. Clara May said, but she was nothing to them now. A small trophy at the edge of their entanglement. A trinket that could only stand there as the canaries fluttered up in their cage and cried out against whatever malevolence had been brought against them. For myself, I’d have rushed in to help, but the general commotion had raised voices in the hallway, and straining to look, I feared for Mr. Vickers at any moment (with maybe even the constables to boot), and sort of froze there in the doorway, a colored man suspended in a white world run amok.

  There ain’t no boys about it, John Hill shouted. There’s just niggers, and the ones who tame them. John Hill was grinning now in his devilment, holding the cage up with one strong hand as A.D. pushed down with it again, while in the same instant eyeing the broken bottle below him. The shards were drenched and glistening, and where the whiskey-soaked rug ran between A.D.’s boots, John Hill lit his great silver lighter and tossed it out toward him. Before you could blink, the flames shot up and danced all blue and hypnotic, and for a moment we stood in a strange sort of abeyance. Felled, I think, by the notion of the world spiraling away from us. A.D.’s boots were black and afire and as he shook them in an odd sort of dance, Ms. Clara May stepped toward him through the smoke to take the cage.

  Come on, A.D. said, holding his hand out to her, practically begging her to leave, for John Hill had already pushed his way blindly from the room. There was only A.D. now to pull Ms. Clara May from the smoke. But she would not move. Flat out refused. It was confounding to see. How she kind of just shrugged her shoulders and A.D.’s sweating hands were no match for her discomfort. As A.D. and I watched then, she wrapped her arms tighter around the cage as if she’d done the same thing every Sunday, as if it were nothing at all to her, before kneeling down, overcome by the heat. I had to drag A.D. out after that from the end of my arm, while Ms. Clara May only seemed to teeter beneath that great awkward cage as we watched. The smoke rose up fierce and black, with her soft strawberry head already sweating and soaked by the moisture, and she seemed strangely at ease. As if she were doing nothing more than wading out into a tepid lake and settling herself down in the water. So that in our last glimpse of her, there was only her face—her soft sad face framed by the great orange flames—and then the yellow birds singing, singing, singing out their song.

  V

  An overseer of sorts ~ The blues through and through ~ The bartender’s glasses ~ A.D.’s conspiring ~ No killing tonight ~ Guns and songs and Jessico ~ The boxcar ~ Killers and fugitives ~ Old Hackett and what transpired there ~ A fog descending ~ Reaching Bladen Street

  THE FLAMES SHOT UP AND THE SIRENS called out so that A.D. told me later, after we’d made it to a saloon I knew on the south side of town, that he’d thought it was his childhood all over. That he was watching his father smolder again in their house and had felt the overwhelming urge to crouch behind a tree and watch the dormitory burn from the park. I’d not let him, of course. Instead, I’d led him in a sort of trance really, grabbing his shoulders and marching him through the side streets and alleys where we might not be found, for there was already the fear of discovery about us. John Hill Carter had certainly made it out and even in the chaotic few moments after everyone realized what was happening, I’d heard him calling out my name and A.D.’s as the perpetrators of this most heinous act.

  Sitting at the bar then, with the whiskey poured before us, I thought on all the articles and implements, books and sheet music I’d accumulated in my seven years at the Peabody, and knew I couldn’t go back for it. It was gone, and I was with A.D. now, and felt like an overseer of sorts. Considering he was so dismayed about leaving Ms. Clara May as we had—burnished in the flames, sweating down to the sweet center of her being—that I thought he might try something rash in his state, like suicide or some other infernal decision. Maybe even confessing to a crime he didn’t commit, just for the guilt he felt in him, for the downright wretchedness of it. The blues, I guess you could say. He had ’em all over for sure. The blues through and through.

  A.D.? I said. But he didn’t move. Didn’t answer neither. I held a whiskey to his lips and made him take a few sips just so the life might be restored to him, so his mind might descend from its high pale lonesomeness. But he didn’t respond. Didn’t even blink. So I tried again. A.D.? Before shaking his arm and patting his back, as if trying to force the air back into him physically, as after a drowning or flogging. But it weren’t no use. He just sat there as cold as ice. It’s okay, son. It is. Truly.

  What’s okay? He turned his cold burning eyes on me, eyes that were lit with a fire whenever he turned his head to scowl at the bar, or the wall, irradiating the world as he looked upon it with his hatred and anguish. That I killed her? That I did it with my own damn ignorance? Is that what’s okay? Is that it? Before I could write her one damn song? The flush had returned to his cheeks and his eyes fluttered up quickly and were shut as he played his fingers over his chin and lips, as if engaged in some physical or religious inventory of his few remaining possessions.

  No, son, I said. Not at all, and I looked to see what other patron might have heard his eruption. This was an establishment known to be raided on occasion with prohibition instituted not six years earlier. Though with it being a colored place, and tucked beside the trolley line, I was not as anxious as I might have been elsewhere. There were just a few old timers at the bar, and they seemed wholly caught up in their own ineptness. Littered amongst the tables, a few groups conversed while others played poker by the light of a paraffin lamp that sent a black cloying soot over everything, and the whole scene made me lonesom
e to be pursued like this, lonesome to no end. Out there in the darkness I knew I was labeled a killer, a fugitive, and in the thunderous noise of the trolley clamoring by, and soft shoes scuffling peanut shells across the floor, the accusations and forces marshalling against us rose in my mind to confront me. And I hoped upon hope A.D.’s words hadn’t been heard by anybody—let alone the bartender—who was the only one left to consider.

  I looked at him and he looked away as if something gnawed at him, before feigning to scour his fogged-up little spectacles. He wiped them again before drying the few bottles near the register, chewing all the while on a cinnamon toothpick he tucked inside the edge of his lip. He was mumbling something too. Some such prayer I never quite caught the gist of. Something about misericordia or a beatitude perhaps.

  She didn’t deserve it, A.D. whimpered. Nobody did. Except maybe that old John Hill Carter bastard, and he stood for a second so that I had to grab his waist and set him back beside me on the stool, holding him close.

  Son, son, I said and touched A.D.’s arm as the bartender watched me from the shadows, rubbing his chin.

  All I need now is to end it for him, A.D. said, not modulating his volume in the least, nor his intentions. Just to find that good old boy and skin him up for what he done to her. Leaving her like that with her cage. Burning up to nothing but smoke and sadness in her abandonment. Hell, and he turned to me as he said it, remembering her and the sad singing voices of those canaries. His blue glassy eyes implored me to speak, to appease him somehow—or the world perhaps—for the fate of every last one of us in our anguish, something I could not do. Something no one could. I watched his hands shake as he said it, and then his fingers fiddled with the empty glass in front of him. But it weren’t no good. Nothing he did could appease his dejection, and pushing himself back on his barstool, he looked me straight in the eye. I left her, Isaiah. I did. As sure as I’m sitting here. When I could have changed everything. When I could have sung to her. When I could have sung.

  Friend, I looked up and the bartender was there. He looked at me and folded his rag into a damp little square before setting his sharp black elbows on the bar. You talking about killing a white man?

  I looked at him for a long moment and didn’t shift my eyes as I thought I might have to drag him out physically if he were to talk any louder and alert everyone to A.D.’s conspiring. Why? I finally said.

  It’s okay, he said and winked his dark beady eyes at me. I don’t care none about it. Not at all, and he shook his gray dusted afro before leaning back and spitting to the floor.

  Then how do you know? A.D. said, and with it I could see A.D. was finally starting to come out of his depression enough to realize he’d been a fool to speak about what he proposed. Even if it was just a colored bar and talk about white folk usually erred to the violent and reprehensible side anyways.

  Hell, ain’t nobody talk about killing a nigger. They just goes out and kills him.

  A.D. looked at me as the bartender leaned in closer. I smelled cinnamon on the man’s breath. He was skinnier than I first thought, and cinched his belt as he watched us and kept tucking his thumbs into his belt as if to suggest it was alright to conspire with him, that it happened nearly every day.

  Well, there ain’t no killing going on tonight, I finally said, and rested my hands on the bar as if that settled it. But he only kept looking at A.D. because A.D. was a sight to see and anybody with eyes could have known something much darker tormented his soul. Something even I couldn’t fathom.

  You sure? he said and smiled at A.D., his bright teeth luminous in the dim chamber, hovering like white-heated coals before us. Because I knows a nigger selling guns not too far from here, and he don’t care who comes for ’em. He’s even got songs too. ’Cause you said you wanted to sing for her now, didn’t you? Didn’t you?

  A.D. didn’t blink. He stared at the bartender, concentrating on what the man was saying, for the bartender had heard everything, and probably heard worse from others all the time. I had to chuckle to think I could a brought A.D. anywheres without his intentions laid bare for the world to see. We weren’t fooling anybody, that’s for sure.

  A gun? A.D. said

  Well, sure, the bartender said. Old Jessico’s got all kinds. And he’s givin’ everything away, too—for the right price. That’s all he talked about. Was here just the other night. He’s got his religion back, too, and says the good lord makes him give up such foolishness when he can’t take the aggravation no more. When he can’t take the guilt.

  A.D. was quiet and bowed in his thoughts, for he must have looked inside himself and seen the guilt he felt too and had held onto in his darkened state, before raising up his heavy head. Where? he finally said, and looked on the bartender as if he were a gift delivered by the fates themselves. I could see he was determined now to carry out whatever curse implored him on in his hunger to right the wrong of Ms. Clara May Staunton.

  Annapolis, the bartender said. On Bladen Street. All I knows is if he don’t drive up he takes the trolley as far as Washburn and then rides the train. Catches a freighter or boxcar as it rolls. Finding his way. You boys can do it. Just tell him old Montague sent you. He knows me. Get you a gun and set your business straight. Especially if he’s white.

  I glared at Montague, but it didn’t do no good. He’d already spoken and A.D. was up and running for the trolley.

  THE FIRST BOXCAR WE JUMPED WAS ROLLING TOO FAST and A.D. fell face first to the tracks and stones and came up spitting splinters and sedge. I had to laugh to see him like that, but he weren’t in the mood so I boosted him up the next chance we had which wasn’t long coming. We jumped to catch one heading south just as easy as could be. Inside we found crates of sacked sugar rolling down from Baltimore and slumped hard on them as we were tired and drunk from our night spent wandering. As we watched the rolling marshland and crab shacks far out on the Chesapeake, A.D. spoke again about the gun and of killing John Hill Carter, and I knew I had to tell him my own reasons for being so dead set against it.

  It don’t change nothing, I said. It don’t. I know.

  He turned and sort of sneered at me, content in his new boldness. How do you know? All you do is mop.

  The night seemed to fall down and push all its mystery and vagueness upon us. The warm spring air carried the dusky scent of coal fire and fish kills and the reeds buzzed with beetles and cicadas and the sounds vibrated up louder through every part of us. So that it seemed to step right in line with the rhythm of the rails we rode until we fell into a kind of connection with everything around us. Like in the boiler room, I guess. In rising up above it, from our bodies, when we played guitar, and I felt like I didn’t have to hold nothing back no more. Not from him. That we were together. The two of us. Killers and fugitives alike. One black and the other white and no color mattered in those circumstances. Even if they’d be coming for me just a little bit more than for him, I thought that was okay just as long as they got him, too. So I breathed out low and long and let him have it. All of it. Why I’d been gone from Bristol to begin with.

  I killed a man, I said. So I knows why, okay? I knows all about it, son.

  You? He turned to me, his mouth agape, his body almost set to rise up on his feet to shake himself free of his disbelief, the notion of it so farfetched to his mind. Where?

  In Virginia, I said and nodded in the direction we were headed. With my own hands, and I looked at them as if they had their own significance, their own part to play in all this. And it ain’t no good, son. I tell you. That’s why I had to leave Bristol to begin with. After all the unpleasantness and hate it changes nothing, and you still feel the same and even worse when you think it’s a release of everything boiling up inside you. But it ain’t. It only ever ends up piling on more of the same, with the guilt and shame.

  You killed a man?

  Is it that hard to figure? and I stared at him with such a cold glare, he turned away and whistled to himself, and finally fell into believing me because h
e looked over his shoulder now and then and shook his head as he considered it. Well, there wasn’t nothing I could a done to stop it, I said, as if to assure him. It was just part of the plan, I guess.

  What plan?

  The universe’s plan. Of them great black skies up there, which had done got sick of seeing me get on as an honest and loving family man for over five years, and kept turning me over till it found a soft spot to test, to poke and prod to see if I’d cave like what it thought I might. Like what they all thought. All of them. To this day. About us.

  The white man?

  Sure. The white man. Who else? But this one I’m talking about was lowdown even for a white man and none wanted to be called his friend and so none probably were surprised he ended up the way he did. Maybe that’s why they didn’t chase after me as much as I thought they would. They already knew everything had been taken from me, and that I couldn’t come back for it.

  I took a deep breath and A.D. waited for me to continue. It’d been many a year since I’d spoken the man’s name, and I didn’t relish having the taste of it on my tongue.

  His name was Hackett, and he was an ornery humpbacked man who worked overseer for the farm I sharecropped with my little wife Annie and our daughter Lucy—who was nothing more than a blackberry of a thing Annie wrapped in a shawl each morning and slung over her shoulder as we worked our parcel. O it was ours, for sure, for five good years, but then Hackett had a notion for the good work we done and wanted more than his share entitled. We grew corn and sorghum for silage, but we had considerable yields. And he desired them. He also developed a taste for nigger as they say, the white men. For he come around most sharecropper shacks after conspiring to have the men called away for whatever inventory or review he could fabricate. With all the other smiling and doddering fools he paid for the convenience, laughing away the whole lot of them like it was the funniest damn thing they’d ever done their whole misbegotten lives, assisting in the outright cruelty of that man.