Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  A capella, he said, and turned up into the blackness. Though as he drove, I knew just what he meant as he repeated the word: Unaccompanied. Himself alone. Away from all his troubles and family and wife. Hell, maybe even Ms. Clara May had already said as much in one of their private talks behind closed doors. The ones I’d often only hear mumbled refrains from in the living room, as I waited for him and watched half-enchanted as Jolie rolled and waddled across the floor. I couldn’t fathom how it had already been six months since we’d been back out on the ridge driving, and her grown so much in the interval.

  But still she knew me, my Jolie. Still she watched me, and would always watch me. No matter what. No matter how far we went or how long we stayed away or what sound or strange incantation we might bring back. I would be there and she’d always roll towards me the way that I knew she would. Her soft sweet face rising like a balloon, smiling that sweet toothless smile of hers, when she raised her sticky hand to touch my foot and I knew she was a saint and remembered her always as I watched out the window as the road rose and fell into nothingness. And yet, yet, in the same instant I thought on her and let the image linger before me, I covered my eyes to the blackness of the road, so that I didn’t have to think too much of my own self, unaccompanied as I was. Alone. Like some feral animal set loose and disheveled. Lost to the wind and chaotic scent of rain mixed with wildflower and fern, scrub pine and oak. We’d just passed up through Blacksburg, Virginia and were over 230 miles from Harpers Ferry. I knew we wouldn’t go there now. No matter how much he muttered her name. No matter how often he whispered Misericordia Jones instead of Ms. Clara May Stanton.

  XXVIII

  Some ghostly veil of lights ~ One vast blue roan ~ Each nuance and grace ~ The subjugation of my kind ~ Crinkled and greased in the lamplight ~ Dark and insidious invectives ~ Firewater ~ The dream of their insect breathing ~ The thin blade of the man

  A HEALING IS WHAT IT IS, he said and I shook myself awake in the cold light.

  A what?

  A healing. Or some kind of force. Something natural and hidden.

  For what?

  For everything. At least it seems to me. It seems to be the only way now for sure.

  The only way for what?

  For living, he said and I could see he was livid. Lit up like some grease-sputtered candle. His blues eyes shook as he scanned the road, and I wondered what he’d been drinking.

  Here? I said and nodded to the darkness.

  He rubbed the black stubble grown long and splotchy along his chin, the grain of which sounded like sandpaper when he lifted his fingers. In the ridge, he said. A sticky whiskey bottle sloshed with a few last sips between his thighs, and the scent of something sugary emanated from his breath. We’d stopped somewheres in the night at some ghostly veil of lights, but then I’d fallen back asleep. Now a few powdered doughnuts rolled in their greasy box as we rounded another corner, and my stomach grumbled in its emptiness. I reached down for one and tasted the sweet wet sugar and jolted up to feel my blood surge another step forward into consciousness.

  I’d had a dream while we’d been driving. A dream where I’d seen the ridge as one vast blue roan charging on ahead, a form racing as we drove, moving swift and furious, and yet also as soft and enveloping as the open sky. And as we ranged up through the mist and low lying pine, the faces of women and children and men all around the world watched as we jumped the heights of the world, touching the dipping stars and unconquered night, and I wondered if those stars were really the lights of our demise. The ones foretold all those months ago by Ezra Lee and then again by Runnymede himself, the lights we hoped to outpace.

  There was a rhythm to my dreaming in those days, a rhythm that seemed to foretell something larger about the world, about some smooth shape dredged from an inexplicable truth I could never know. Not entirely. And it vexed me, but also made me curious and hopeful. I sensed a vast landscape etched on the very contours of my soul, something dark and nuanced and stained in deep purples and blacks that shined in a kind of internal light. And always when my dreaming self looked to the sky to see what had cast its shimmery rays to lead us on, Runnymede always rounded into being and smiled down in his munificence. Runnymede showering us with his sinister grin set amidst the pale moon of his face. And from then on I would see him as both tormentor and beacon, a force to repel and encourage us in turn. Rolling down the window, I licked the white sugary powder off my lips, and laughed into the wind to cast the image of him away from me as I refocused my mind on the road. The ridge, I said, and pointed to the high rolling shapes that ranged up before us.

  That’s right. The ridge, A.D. said. It’s ours. Always has been. Always will be, and he nodded out the front windshield as if it were an extension of himself. As if the ridge had been composed from the very chambers of his heart and contained everything he thought he was: an artist, a provider, an ambassador. A conduit. He thought he was speaking for the ridge when he didn’t even know it. Not really. He only thought he knew it, as far as I was concerned. He thought he alone gave it purpose above all others, granting it an essence and truth. His truth. Alone.

  Hell, I said and watched him, and tasted the sourness on my tongue as I heard his familiarity with something I’d spent my whole life watching and absorbing. Something I knew I’d never know all the way. And here his conceitedness about it filled the whole car, before spilling out in a bright brimming wave to cover me, too. We were here now, I knew, in the ridge, and he was intent on taking and taking some more and thinking it was alright to do so. That it was how it was supposed to be with him from then on. That he alone knew what he was doing. That he alone had the insight. That the voices we was finding were really from the people and not the ridge. When all along I knew it was the other way around. That it was from the ridge through and through—always from the ridge—that we took, and we were just lowly passengers on its rising berth, passengers on that blue dreamy roan, the one that could buck us off at any moment and leave us scattered to the dust.

  Hell, nothing, he said. It’s heaven is what it is. Heaven through and through. Son, I said, and I shook my head to feel the sugary rush and speed of the road rise to meet us, for he forced the car on as if he meant to swallow the world he went so fast. We don’t even know what the ridge is. Listen to me. I know. I’ve been in it my whole life and know we ain’t even tapped it yet, see? Not in the least. Not inside nor outside nor all the way around. We can’t even look inside it yet to see what it is for sure, just like in our own selves, and I shook myself out like a dog in waking up more fully to the power of what I meant to say. Did he know what I meant to say? Did he hear me speaking about the voices inside us that we never listened to, that no one ever listened to? Well? Did he? I stopped and watched him to see if anything, a dawning or spark might take hold in his eyes, refocusing them in the slightest. But all he could do was look on me in his silence. He looked and looked and had to laugh to see how serious I was with what I’d said, about what we didn’t know inside ourselves, about what everyone living or dying was afraid to see for all time inside ourselves. Then he kind of just nudged me with his hand playful-like, for he could see I had it too now, that I’d been taken over by it already, the fever—his fever—that it had spread to me too. A contagion.

  But I’d known that before. I’d felt it creeping over me for months. Felt it even in just talking about the ridge, in thinking on the hidden and gathered spaces of it, in its ancient and budding depths, in each nuance and grace, and knew I had it for good just the same as he did. That it had spread inside me as we’d tracked down more and more names and slept in more and more roadside shacks and ate in broken down pantries and apple carts and wagons and one-bulb diners where the locals eyed me and a grizzled waiter or short order cook always pointed no matter where we were to a single tin sign saying No Coloreds. Or to one saying No Negroes Allowed, and I’d ease myself back out to the darkening sunset with a roasted hambone on waxpaper and a Lash’s Orange Drink and eye the blueness edgi
ng out above the treeline. And always the lonesomeness heightened by the subjugation of my kind would rush through me and I’d wish for nothing else but to stand there forever and let the blueness absorb me bit by bit. To let it take me up into its essence and be done with it. I needed it to wash away the sins of these people and my own designs of dragging A.D. back out into it all over again.

  But the contagion was too powerful. I couldn’t no more turn him back nor turn back myself no matter what. Not when he made me furious with what he thought he knew about my ridge. And especially not when I wanted him to go on forever burning to get the songs to make us real to bring my family back to me alive and safe.

  SO I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING WHEN I taunted him. Maybe it was for my Annie and Lucy girl. Or more likely for my guilt, at dragging him out into the ridge again, even though I knew it was the only way. Or maybe I was just tired. I’d been waiting hours in the sun and it was dark now and lonesome. So when he finally got out of the diner and was drinking some moonshine or rotgut or something that someone had give him, I looked him up and down and said, she’s waiting.

  At each stop, he took it upon himself to pump the locals for songs and names, for locations and whereabouts, and whatever else might be mentioned in light of the slip he’d hold up before them, crinkled and greased in the lamplight. That day, he’d been going at it all afternoon and into the evening as the diner morphed into a roadhouse of some repute, as more and more trucks rolled up and fellows rolled out with the dust and dirt of their day’s labor still wedded to their trousers. As each one of them eyed me, I stood there as sedate and unconcerned as could be and sipped my soda while they stepped inside muttering dark and insidious invectives my way. But I stood there nonetheless and watched for him. Always for him. And always he’d come back to me.

  Damn right she’s waiting, he said and slapped my shoulder and spun his hand up to gesture to the tree line as the crunching sound of gravel on some far off backwoods road echoed over the faint clearing. Nearby a few rusted swing sets and see saws creaked and settled and stirred again in their remorseless decay as if meting out some ancient curse on me. Or some raw truth.

  She’s waiting for you to come back, I said. I didn’t mean no real harm by it. I just meant to joke on what was truly real (I thought) in his situation with Ms. Clara May. But I suppose I’d cut too close to the heart, for before I blinked I heard a crunch of gravel, a shifted boot, and then A.D. leaned over me with that pint of moonshine pointed at my eye.

  He blinked once watching me, his mouth poised to speak, to refute me, but then stopped as he blew out a long slow sigh before whispering, You’re right. You’re right. She’s been waiting all this time and I didn’t even know it, did I? Didn’t even know it enough to see nor care.

  Well, you can care now, I said.

  Jesus Christ, he said and shook his head kicking out his boot. Is this what this is now? After all this? You giving me marriage advice? And he glowered cold and amused then because he knew what I’d done with my own family, disbanding them as I had with my own act of violence. So when he seen how lonesome and sad it made me feel, he snickered low and malicious to himself, and held his glass bottle out as if a sword, something he might thrust through me if given half the chance. Then he pointed with it to the first white cusp of moon rising above the trees, and I looked on it with him, knowing it would be hard to tempt him back into speaking on the life he needed, and that all this drinking and running was just to cover the pain of losing her.

  There ain’t no marriage if you ain’t ever there.

  Ain’t there? Ain’t there? He took another gulp of the firewater that seemed to seethe in the cracks of his skin, sweating out his pores and brow, outlining him in a glistening rain of poison.

  You heard me.

  I heard you, but don’t believe it. Not for a second.

  Believe it, I said and he turned on me with his breath a fiery convection of steam and spit and spoke with a voice I’d never heard before. Well, just go on then if you miss her so much, he hissed. Go on back there now if you want to leave me, too.

  A door slammed somewheres close by. As I listened, the footsteps died away before a blast of music was thrust upon us, and a bird fluttered off on its soft swift wings. I’d taken it as my cue to fly up then, too, to lighten whatever darkness my line of discourse had already brought down upon us, and turned to him tilting my head, smiling. If I’d a thought it’d done any good, I’d a left a long time ago.

  She ain’t left me, he whispered. She ain’t. He tapped the bottle on my cheek, before tracing it down my chin to rest above my throat. The outside of the glass was beaded with moisture. The cicadas and crickets sang on with their incessant pulsation, so that as I listened, I drifted into the trance of their existence momentarily. As if I’d passed into the dream of their insect breathing and living and dying away. But even as that sound faded, only the force of my heart seemed to remain, rising as a rhythm, rising inside my chest like a song. The constant pleading of which I wondered if he heard, leaning over in all his anger and rage and rancor. The hell with you then, he whispered. The hell.

  Just let it out now, son. Let it out. You been inside your head too long now anyways. Too long.

  Why you call me that? He pressed even harder with the bottle to my throat, so that the first sweaty drops from my chin trickled down to my belly button. I could feel the warm gleaming trail as I leaned further back and all the burning rage of him reared above me, for he knew I was saying something he could not. That I was speaking about what was inside him all along and touching it so quickly, and easily, as to dispel him, to disarm him, and he wanted none of that. He wanted never to be disarmed against his emotions. Why you call me that, huh? Why? he said, louder, and hotter. Charged by the effort the anger had built in him, I watched as the thin blade of the man blossomed into an anger unseen until that moment. He seemed to measure my very existence with his tongue, licking his sweaty lips to see me as prey, as victim, or as his curse, perhaps. And as if drawn by the thirst and power his blood and cruelty revealed another current rose to appraise us where we stood.

  Son, is this nigger bothering you? A man hovered somewheres behind us. I could smell the raw menace of him. The odor of rich tobacco mixed with horseshit and gin.

  I ain’t your son, A.D. said to me, before turning to that other man, the bottle raised in his fist. I ain’t anybody’s son. For I seen it then, the power he never knew he held over me. The power he’d never acknowledged with him being white and me being black. It glimmered there now as a spark in his flesh as he looked on that man as if he never seen him, but then smiled just the same, demented like, to know he might have occasion to light a spark into a raging fire. To call over that good old boy and a few more from inside to help beat me down with that bottle and string me up in the trees. I ain’t nobody’s son, he said softer, after realizing it—the power and the constant force of it—and lurched off as that man eyed me the more when I followed A.D. and touched his shoulder and stood there with him. Behind us we heard the music blare out from the door as the man finally passed inside, before A.D. pointed with his bottle at the pale wan face of the moon, shining as full and untroubled as a midnight sun. She’s waiting, he said.

  She sure is, I muttered. She’s waiting on you.

  Then I suppose we shouldn’t disappoint her.

  XXIX

  About his motives and deeds ~ A severance from his success ~ Our name ~ The dark maw ~ North of Harpers Ferry ~ The spirit of the voice ~ Above the C & O Canal ~ That disembodied limb ~ Horses ~ The track ~ The grandeur and elegance and style ~ The numbers ~ Like eternal rings ~ They just floated there

  THINGS TENDED TO FALL AWAY FROM US AFTER THAT. When he turned up north I knew where he was going even before he said anything. Shoot, even when I knew it would take us further from Ms. Clara May and little Jolie, I kept my mouth shut. I knew we were bound together now in a way that was much tighter than before, after his sad words in the parking lot, when he’d said
he wasn’t nobody’s son, leaving a trail of disappointment behind him. He had slunk off then to the car and just waited for me to climb in before driving on, and so I just let him.

  It was then that I had a premonition about his motives and deeds. For even then, even with the words he’d said and the miserable way he looked at me afterwards, as if to say sorry for what he done, holding my throat to the edge of that bottle, subjugating me to his rage, I could tell he still had a notion about how to get himself where he wanted to go. To what he always wanted to be. Raising himself up in standing now after another song come in. After another hook was pulled up out of the confusion of lines and lyrics we found, brought back into being by his healing hands. For we were the healing now, I knew. We were the salving away and the washing over of the wounds and rage of the past, even as we moved deeper into it, even as we became a part of it more and more. And as another night passed and another, and still he drove on and drank and handed me the bottle to wash it all down with, I knew it was the fever that really had us both tuned together as one. It was the fever and a burning away of everything that had come before, and everything that could possibly come next.

  Because to burn up like that meant we were getting closer to the truth, to the ridge and essence of it all, wedded as we were to our cause of being the voice for everyone up here and down below. For the ones who only ever heard Runnymede now on the radio, Runnymede singing and spewing out his artlessness. It was our time now. Our time because we were intent on giving him a severance from his success, in removing him from everything he’d gained and what still we wanted. Everything that I felt he’d taken from us by being so opposed to A.D. from the beginning, in deriding his views at the Peabody when A.D. was nothing more than a scared little pup dragged in from the cold. And then for haunting us too—or at least me—with his fame and pride to keep us down, and maybe even more than that in the bargain. But who could say? Who else could keep us down without a name, without the same name he’d never spoken, even as the Hardy Family’s songs were still heard on the radio, and The Ballad of Clara May still played regular enough that A.D. sung it out loud as if dredging up all its remaining secrets and stories. For that was perhaps Runnymede’s most grievous sin. To deny us our place. Our name.