It was our ridge now. In our time. On the next hill there might be another song rounding into being, or another song rounding out the mystery of our duty—of what we felt obliged to do in our souls and fingers and bones—to find them and to keep them and to give them all out to everyone forever. Amen.
BUT MISERICORDIA AIN’T HERE.
She ain’t?
No, suh. Not at all. The voice was low and shaky and come from the dark maw of a splintered doorway as if resurrected from a crypt, and it was a wonder we’d ever made it down here at all. We’d walked half an hour already, heading north of Harpers Ferry along the overgrown banks of the Potomac River, just as the little nigger boy had told us by the bridge after we’d arrived. Keeping the trail, heeding the chunk marks cut slantwise into the trees, we knew we’d headed in the right direction, but never expected this. Touching his head, A.D. pointed as the thicket opened to a clearing leading down to the rocks, and if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have dreamt it in a thousand years—a house made of broomsticks, set right out in the current—right in the water.
It was like a fantasy. Or something you’d hear from a child in waking, but would dismiss the next instant. There we stood, dumbfounded and awestruck and sunk too in our effort from sweating and carrying all the things that A.D.
wanted us to carry out here to folks in the hinterland: bottles of whiskey and gin, bags of bread and boloney and smoked beef, real Belgian chocolate and small paper sacks of rock candy and Teaberry Chewing Gum, licorice and caramels, and every other damn thing he thought might tempt them into giving up their songs. Hell, I even had a guitar and portable Victrola strapped to my back and would crank it up and play a record if the person ain’t never seen it before nor heard tell the sound of the phonograph and needle in the grooves. So you’d think it was the devil himself come to visit them. The spirit of the voice walking on water almost as airy as Jesus himself.
Thinking nothing of it, A.D. stepped right up to the edge of that bank, shook his head at the lengths he’d had to go already to get here, and looked at the late April dusk, which had a sort of smoky wonder to it. A purple light from the Blue Ridge filtered down, brushing against the high treetops and branches, basking the fern and moss in shadow, the rocks and roots, before he started out on the thin wobbly gangplank. The one they’d stretched from shore to the rickety railing of that houseboat, bobbing as it were on the edge of its chain in the water. Standing there, I could feel my heart race as my neck cooled from the sweat. I hadn’t even had time to set down my guitar or Victrola before A.D.’s first question was answered and he’d needed to get his bearings again.
She ain’t here?
No, suh. She up at the track.
The track?
Well, sure. In Charles Town. At the racetrack. Ain’t you heard? They talking all about it on the line, and a solemn black finger pointed from the doorway to the railroad along the banks on the other side. The B & O Railroad above the C & O Canal. Horses.
Horses?
From all over. They come and bet on anything, the rich, and Misericordia calms them down when she can. She’s a walker and a scribe, too, for Mr. Albert Boyle, the owner. But she don’t see no one from outside for sure, let alone two, and A.D. and I shuffled on our boots to think on it, that we come all this way to not even see her. She sings to them for luck and gets her money back double betting on the sly.
She sings to them.
Nearly every day.
The horses?
To the horses.
Well, we’ll just see if she won’t sing to us then, too, he said, or at least me. And that was it. It was enough. A.D. had shook hands with that disembodied limb already and said his much obliges and thank yous. He even left a brand new bottle of gin on the porch for the limb’s troubles, and then backed away solemn and steady like before huffing and puffing all the way up the trail and didn’t say another word till we were driving the ten miles west to Charles Town and seen that tin sign for the Shenandoah Valley Jockey Club. It was a long dirt road that wound up then. One lined with laurel and cottonwood and elm that swayed in the late evening breeze, so that he just had to whistle low and sonorous to see it. Shoot, he said, and that was all, for there was only the grandeur of it now to consider. The grandeur and style.
There were high whitewashed wooden grandstands along the homestretch of the long dirt oval track. Flags of the state of West Virginia and the United States of America and the Republic of Ireland fluttered as the lanterns were turned low in the twilight and the crackling voice of the announcer came over the loudspeaker with his excitement for the next field of thoroughbreds. As all the spectators turned to look into the ether, the announcer spewed out the line of odds and fluctuating numbers as a short stout bookie walked from end to end below the grandstand with a long notepad that he tore pages from as boys and men trailed behind shouting their questions and implications of conditions, asking the names of jockeys and their experience forthwith. Then another boy would run off from the bookie with the torn pages to the window where a man in a black visor took in the paper slips and money and sent back out stubs for the boy to distribute.
Goodness, it was such a strange assortment of people and movement and proceedings, my head hurt in the excitement and confusion of the crowd. After sidling up to the first unruly edge of it, A.D. had already walked off to look at the faces of the black women in the crowd (if there were any). But then he spied the shed rows behind the grandstand and just knew that was where she was, Misericordia, singing her songs out to calm the ones intent on racing, and so without as much as a parting word or hand wave, he was off. While I watched him leave, I’d kept the whiskey bottle we’d been drinking on the drive and drained the last few sips of it. The whiskey was hot and quelled the pounding in my head, for the sleep had not come easy those last few nights and already I saw two racetracks instead of one stretch out before me blurred and disheveled and locked together like eternal rings that went on and on in their geometry as an ancient rune or tapestry. So that when A.D did step off into the crowd I seen two of him leave as well, swallowed up by the numbers, and had to shake my head.
O the numbers, the numbers! There were so many numbers and money fluttering about, from ticket stub to slip and back again, my eyes hurt to see it all and to know that a general collapse of the country’s economy hadn’t hit anywheres near this place. But the rich did have a way, didn’t they? They could find themselves removed from any of the circumstances of their fellow man as easy as that, and so Mr. Albert Boyle must have done it, too. Setting up this little entertainment here even as the rest of the world floundered at the edges just to hold on, and as I turned to stalk the rail to find out where that boy was with the bookie, to see if I couldn’t get in on the action a bit, I give up after only a few steps for I could feel my feet weren’t in it no more. The walking along that trail had done me in and as I was about to bend and loosen my laces, at that same damn instant the sharp bell clanged and a great whoop went out and I seen the horses. O the horses charging off as a wave of motion and pageantry, so that my heart went out with them as they run and thumped, and it was all I could do to breathe to see them go. Beauty, I whispered and shook my hands free of the whiskey bottle that slumped to my boots, for I was standing up close to the rail and could see them all going away and even leaned closer to feel the backwards leading draft of the speed careening off them around the first turn.
The lights from town sent up a diffuse halo in the clouds, and with the crowd shouting and applauding in the stands, and the cigarette smoke and cigars swirling and the concession stalls all lit up and electric, somehow, in the mixture of all three—the smoke and light and air—an unusual clarity come over me. So that as the horses raced off, a vision of their movement solidified, and I could see each single leading stride. A big blue roan worked the rail and come along, passing all the rest, and as he turned for the tape I was so close to him I could watch the great long strides from almost directly behind and had never seen anything lik
e it. With his legs stretched out, and the long ribboned mane flowing as the jockey leapt up and up in his stirrups, carrying himself always higher into the blinding draft, it was as if the horses weren’t even touching down. Not at all. I looked and saw a few bright specks of dirt fly up, but couldn’t tell if their legs ever stopped or started they went so fast. As if they just floated there. Or were held aloft in some ethereal current. Some shifting glitch of space and time. That to hover in the air like that, with their heads moving up and down was a new way to move across the world, and only the horses had figured it out.
It was breathless and immediate and true was what it was, and a white Arabian had overtaken my blue roan to win. It was a sleek stark animal that raised up its fore legs after crossing and then whinnied and shimmied, the sweat frothing from its mouth. Being as the racetrack was still in its infancy, and drawing in more and more spectators, this next race was designated a special maiden race for two year olds, and as soon as it was announced another rush of folks flowed down to the railing as the flash-lamps from the great wide tripods and cameras fizzled and crackled in the air. The parade of animals had started coming in, so that my head was dizzy with the rush of it all.
The speed. It was still in me and I had to wave my hand to quell the force of it to know I was here at such a time as this and could witness such creatures as these. Ones that could roam the whole Earth in the freedom of their movement. As if cleaving the air weren’t nothing to them. So that if the rail weren’t there nor the betting slips or gambling, nor even the harnesses and bits to keep them in, they would’ve gone to the end of our knowing and loving them for sure to run as they did. And the thought gave me such a heady feeling, like the ridge drifting up into its blueness, I had to close my eyes and open them again just to feel the wild grandeur of it all. For as if formed from the very air itself, a face of the utmost calm appeared beside me, a face resplendent in the flashing lampshine and chaos and smoke.
XXX
The dance ~ The darker order of the world ~ Amen to many things ~ The first purchase ~ The form that began the order that initiated the way ~ A great collapsing ~ Always toward the lights
IT’S MORE A DANCE THAN A CONTEST, WOULDN’T YOU SAY?
Sir?
Why the race, of course, Runnymede said, when the thrill of watching becomes the sport. When we think they might just be able to transcend the rail and shape and steel and be made free in the running. Free in their choosing. I turned toward him and as he inched closer, I could smell the sour whiskey of my breath.
Free?
Why certainly. For I felt it too, he said, and so did they. He nodded with a swift uptick with his head, as if to encompass the crowd, the grandstand, the airy masses behind us. I know something more about it, too, he said, and he touched his chin and held a long finger there. Because it wasn’t only for them, friend. The speed. The force of their going away, the anticipation and arc of their return. No, for I saw you. I watched the horses and I watched you and was almost as enchanted with your empathy toward them, with your conjoining in their struggle—with their purchase, as it were—amid the darker order of the world.
Purchase?
Of course, and his face shook across the syllables to think I might question the veracity of the word. In the order of which they were ordained. In how they were kept and reared and bet upon. With how they’ll be bred and set out to pasture and slaughtered. As it is with animals, so it is with Man. All is contained within the purchase of a life—and in the history of each purchase—for that is how it was before the world began, and that is how it will be beyond the world’s end. Amen.
My knees trembled. My boots felt slack and limp, as if no flesh or bone occupied them.
But don’t you say that too, friend? Don’t you say amen? He leaned back to regard me, as if he’d reared up above the whole Earth to sneer down upon me from his heights.
How do you know that? I whispered. How do you know? My chest shrunk at the mention of my own incantation, as my own word was thrust back upon me. I had said amen to many things before, and had prayed before I could even remember knowing what it was to pray and even after I gave up believing prayer would deliver any answers, or deliver my Annie or Lucy girl. Now here he was saying the same thing to me as if he knew inside my own mind and dreams, and the disclosure cowed me. It cut a fear into me I hadn’t felt before in seeing him, but which overran me now and defeated me when all I wanted was to cut him down instead. To cut him down to die.
Speak, he said and smiled his soul-chilling smile as the last two year old was led through the wide wooden paddock and gated. The crowd hushed, poised upon the precipice of the charging away, mesmerized by the sheer certainty of the violent motion. As if all was forestalled by the spectacle of the sport.
There was a woman, I said, not looking at him, not hearing or moving, just remembering as I glazed over and could finally see it—the field stretching out to the horizon, in that old heat of cotton. Heat like the very fabric we worked through and which we believed was elemental to our lot, penance for being born black in a world full of whites.
Yes, he said rubbing his big white hands. A woman. When you were young. When I was young, I echoed and saw her face surfacing from the white palimpsest of his skin. She was black as coal and turned to me as I worked beside my daddy. As we picked tobacco, and she said it to the air she did. Said amen and I didn’t know what it meant. Then I heard my daddy say it too and then I said it my own self and they laughed to hear me call out with the word and my daddy hushed me once and touched my lips saying, That is our word, son. Ours. The one that’s been given us for all time, a salve for our troubled hearts. And from then on whenever the reverend said it and the congregation repeated it, I would say it soft as if it were mine, too. Mine alone. The word as entrance to the spirit. As entrance to the feeling.
He nodded like an Old Testament sage. The feeling of connection. Of joining and being joined. The feeling without end or harm or fear.
Yes, sir. Without fear.
But the feeling didn’t last, he said. For as sure as I know the number 4 horse will fall on the last turn, I can see it written on your face. You couldn’t feel it. Not all the way. Not to your core. The bell rang and I surfaced from the depths of his voice to see the wave of thundering hooves roll off again, rolling across the continent like a rifle shot before I lost myself again in his sound, in his darker examination. For it wasn’t what you found, was it? I said nothing, but watched them race on. Not after the world worked on you in the way that it did, he said. Not after all that. This amen of yours couldn’t help you after your daddy died.
No, sir, it couldn’t. I touched my head to think on it, to think on my daddy and the frail picture of him, the waste of years. The work, I finally mumbled. It was too much for him. Always was. Too much for anyone.
Yet still you searched for it, he said. That feeling. That sense of connection and calming and turning away, and—dare I say—religion. He smacked his lips as he said the word and laughed as the crowd pulsed forward and the horses moved like a raging storm, bringing their truth and beauty to the world. Their truth. Your wife, he said.
Yes, and I could feel my heart beat plaintive and slow in its bloody sludge. My wife believed, I said. Always did. Even after I told her my own doubts and frustrations on the matter. Even after I’d lost my daddy for no reason other than he’d had to work for us to eat. But she took me to church just the same and started in on me, learning me my letters and words in the process, and I fell into it again. After I’d left it behind. After it’d given me nothing of its succor and mystery and charm. Nothing of the promised healing and release.
And ease?
Yes, that great high ease of the thing. Of giving yourself over to the light that is yours alone and all that you’ll ever be. Amen, I said and watched him smile to hear the reflex in me, a reaction to my life, to what I’d left behind. For it has stayed with me, I said. The one word I’ve kept, even if I know it’s not true. That it’s a fal
seness and a charming, like what a charlatan and rogue would make together. So instead I looked to the ridge. I looked to the blueness of the ridge for my succor, because it always and forever burned inside me with a knowingness, with a feeling I cannot name, but that I know is good and true and always rising in me. Always rising as something giving back to me more than I could ever know, more than I could ever hope or feel or shape, and that also moves on ahead of me from here. I touched my chest then, and touched my heart to show him what I meant. It moves on ahead of me into something that is free. Finally free from all these deeds, from all these needs.
Ha! He laughed and pointed at the horses across the wide track, at the jockeys’ fine colored shirts and boots a slick blur and spray of mud. The crowd leaned closer and shouted at the speed of their passing, but then paused, as if suspended in their revelry. I turned and watched them and it was as if they’d been brought up short before the incidence of the accident foretold. For they all sucked in a final breath, drawing in the very marrow of the night, as the number 4 horse went down in a heap of legs and limbs and rags and the cries went up immediately.
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