He had been the only hand on this ranch since news of the war’s end reached them, a good three or four months after the fact. Miss Doreen had been sick, off and on, for almost two years and her husband dead for one. There had been children of this union. Two were buried in the small plot next to their father, one dead of smallpox, the other died an infant. Two more, I learned, had been carried off by Indians.
Miss Doreen’s reedy voice crept out of the cabin often, always calling for Sedge. He could hear her from anywhere, even from the corrals with the horses thundering their hooves in the dirt. “Yesem,” he’d holler. “I comin’.” And he’d take off in a sprint. Her voice was surprisingly strong for a dying woman, and it did not weaken over the time we were there. After he’d reached the cabin I could hear her complaining, “What took you so long, Sedge?”
Sometimes Sedge simply rode away, out into the wild lands surrounding the ranch. He would be gone for hours, and while he was gone Mo and I would ignore Miss Doreen’s calls. When Sedge returned he did not say anything about his absence, but would always go straight to the cabin and check on her.
I once helped Sedge change the sheets on her bed so he could wash them. I discovered that I had been wrong about the cabin. It was not two rooms but one long one, Miss Doreen in her iron bed at one end, a round table beside the bed, and on the table, a huge globe lamp painted with a hunting scene. At the other end of the cabin, the fireplace, kettles and fry pans, a rocking chair, and a small table next to it. In between the two ends of the cabin were a braided rug, a trunk, the pallet where Sedge slept at night, and columns of dust motes drifting in dim shafts of sunlight from the little windows.
Sedge told me that Miss Doreen was once a large woman. Now she was skeletal, her hair a wispy cloud on the pillow, her skin blooming with brown spots, two thin arms on top of the covers. A sour smell permeated the house. Miss Doreen raised her head and pointed a finger at me. “Who is this nigger?” she asked.
“This Persy, Mizz Doreen,” Sedge said. “You ’member Persy. You got him back in New Orleans, jest befo’ you married Massuh Hill and come here.”
I looked at Sedge and shook my head. I did not care to be a slave again, pretend or otherwise. He waved his hand at me, dismissing my discomfort. Miss Doreen squinted, as if trying to recall. “I remember,” she finally said, and laid back on the pillow and closed her eyes. “Paid good money for you, nigger. Where you been, Persy? You run off or something?”
Sedge nodded at me to answer, and I swallowed my pride and went along. I did it for Sedge. I did it for the entrapment he felt in taking care of this bag of bones clad in white skin.
“No ma’am,” I said. “I have been right here.”
She raised her head again and narrowed her eyes at me. “Huh. What’d you do? Get you an education while I lie here sick?” She cleared her throat, a huge, wet and viscous noise coming from the depths of her lungs as she held up one finger to Sedge. He leaned down and brought up a bowl, helped her rise up so she could spit into it, something stringy and yellow. Sedge wiped her mouth with a nearby cloth and eased her back onto the pillows.
“Persy gonna help me change yo’ sheets, Mizz Doreen. He gonna pick you up while I change ’em. I gots some clean ones right here.” He patted at the folded linens he had set at the end of her bed.
“All right,” she consented. “About time. I can’t believe how you let me lie in my own filth the way you do. When Mister Hill gets home I’m gonna have him cane you.”
“Yesem,” Sedge said. He pulled the covers back. She had on a thin white nightgown through which I could see her sagging breasts, the dark circles of her nipples, and the bare, sparse triangle of pubic hair. I turned my head away and reached under her and lifted her into my arms. She weighed nothing. That she was alive was a cruel miracle.
Sedge made quick work of stripping the bed and replacing the dirty linens with the clean ones. Miss Doreen fell asleep in my arms and stirred only a little as I placed her back in the bed, and Sedge pulled the covers up to her chin. He was tender with her. He was tender and gentle and I wondered for the way she treated him. She was, I suppose, out of her mind, and Sedge, having known her prior to this, understood it better than anyone.
We stayed three weeks. Our days were spent with the horses, our nights in camp out in the yard, or if the weather was bad, hunkered down with the mules in one of the barns. During these three weeks it seemed that nothing changed with Miss Doreen. Every day Sedge carried food in and slop out. I thought of Chloe of course, and of her time spent caring for Missus Lila, of the duties she performed, of the hours spent sitting passively by Missus Lila’s bedside. I thought of the scent of that room, the sun shafting through the windowed doors that led onto the balcony. I wondered if Chloe ever rose from her chair while Missus Lila slept. I wondered if she ever stepped out onto the balcony and tried to find me among the slaves in the cane fields, or driving a wagon to the sugarhouse, or perhaps, at midnight during a new moon, if she stood there and watched the torches bob as we made our way back to the quarters for a few hours’ rest.
The time came, about two weeks into our stay, in which I had ridden every horse on the Double H. They were broken, all of them, and I was broken too. I had a skill, and while it was not one that I had ever wanted, it was one that I was proud of. I could see that knowing horses could serve me well. I could also see that Mo was feeling restless to move on.
Each night by the campfire, before Sedge came out to join us, Mo spat and tore at his food and looked at the sky and said, “Winter comin’ on.” It was August. Hot as blazes. I could not see that winter was any sort of threat to us, but Mo insisted that it was. “Gotta get there,” he’d say, spitting, always spitting. “Gotta build some corrals fo’ the horses.” Spit. “Gotta have us a place to stay.” Spit. “This takin’ too long. How long it take a ol’ woman to die, anyway?”
Each night Sedge came out to briefly join us by the fire, and Mo asked if anything had changed and Sedge would shake his head, look down at his feet, and say, “You go on, Mistah Tilly. I catch up to you.”
“I ain’t lettin’ you travel alone out there. Indians.”
“I could at least make it safe to Drunken Bride.”
Mo spat. “Maybe. Prob’ly not. Don’t matter. I ain’t hunkerin’ down in that shit-hole, waitin’ on you. You got every right to leave here.”
“Yassuh. That what I tell myself. I cain’t do it though. You go ahead. I catch up.”
And so they went around like this for several nights until Mo said, “I reckon after she die we be wantin’ to take some lumber with us.”
Sedge nodded. “Yassuh?”
“Well, Persy and me ain’t got much to do right now. We could be takin’ down one of them barns. Speed things up a little if we ready to go.”
Sedge looked sadly at the barns, each one a dark smudge leaning against the night sky. I looked at them, too, with alarm, for I did not relish taking apart a building that threatened to tumble on me at the first tap of a hammer. “Which one?” Sedge asked.
“That one on the end there, to the west. I been lookin’ at it. It ain’t got much stuff in it.”
“It ain’t my barn,” Sedge said.
“Whose barn is it, then?”
“It Mizz Doreen’s. You know that.”
“Mizz Doreen? Mizz Doreen who ’bout to die any minute now?”
“I cain’t let you take down that barn, Mistah Tilly. I cain’t let you steal lumber while she alive.”
Mo spat. “Did I say somethin’ ’bout stealin’ lumber? Shit, Sedge. You ’bout thickheaded. You ain’t understood a word I say. I wants to take down that barn so’s we can repair the other two. It jest make good economic sense to have two good barns ’stead of three bad ones. And Persy and me ain’t got nothin’ to do. Might as well help out round here.”
Sedge looked up and grinned. “Yassuh. That be a big help. That be real fine.”
And so the next day we began moving things out of the barn and dismant
ling it. Mo sent me, against my protests, to the roof to pull the tin. I could feel the structure sway in the wind. “You’re going to kill me,” I yelled down to Mo.
He spat and hollered up, “Careful, Persy. You ain’t no use to me dead.”
As I threw down lumber, Mo sorted it, pulled the nails out, and loaded the best pieces into the Double H wagon pulled close by. The bent nails went into a bucket, which he wedged in beside the wood. He covered the wagonload with canvas. And still Miss Doreen lived. Even over the banging of our hammers as we knocked boards apart, and the screech of nails as we yanked them out of the wood, I could hear her voice drifting across the air. “Who’s out there, Sedge? What are they doing? About time you niggers did some work.”
And then the barn was down, and Mo began the task of casting around the ranch for anything we might use on our journey. We cleaned and oiled old saddles, snapped the dust out of horse blankets, cleaned and repaired tack and re-braided lariats.
In all this exploration I found three whips, coiled and hung on nails inside what had been the middle barn. The whips were just like the ones at Sweetmore, just like the ones the overseers had carried before most of them had left for the war, just like the whip Holmes had used to deliver my fifty lashes. I reached out and touched my finger to it. And then I lifted it off its nail and held its handle and let it unfurl into the dirt at my feet. Mo walked by carrying a kettle. “Take ’em,” he said. “Might come in handy.”
I shook my head and coiled the whip again, hung it back on its nail. “No.”
Mo shrugged. “All right. We ain’t wantin’ to be too burdened down with stuff, anyway.” He walked off to put his kettle in the wagon.
Mo and I made camp out in the yard that night, the sky clear, the moon full and casting shadows across the ground. The shadow of the corrals laid stripes in the dirt. The shadows of the two remaining barns were solid and black, like the block of tobacco Mo carried in his haversack. The moon was so bright that I could even see the shadow of Mo’s spittle whenever he let one fly. We’d eaten a chicken for dinner. Mo had killed it in spite of Sedge’s protests that Miss Doreen needed the eggs. Something had shifted in Mo. The wagons were packed. He was ready to travel. “We done all we can here,” he said too many times.
We heard the cabin door squeak open and close. Sedge was preceded by his shadow as he loped out to join us. “She sleepin’ now,” he said as he sank down beside the fire.
“Dark clouds over there,” Mo said. “Storm comin’.”
I rose up to look. The horizon had become inky black, but it was so far off, it did not seem a threat. I lay back down.
“We runnin’ outta feed, Mistah Tilly,” Sedge said.
“Yep.” I heard Mo spit.
“You oughta take the horses and go on without me. I don’t want them horses to die. They needs pasturin’.”
“They do,” Mo said. “I ain’t goin’ without you, Sedge.”
“I ain’t goin’ till she do.”
They fell silent and then Mo said, “Comin’ closer.”
I sat up again, propping onto my elbows. Far off, lightning flashed and illuminated the underside of dark roiling clouds. But here the moon still shone, and the storm seemed faint, and faraway, almost like a dream.
“How long you think befo’ it get here?” Sedge asked.
“We know soon enough.”
The lightning off in the distance snaked down to the earth in bright jagged spears. Each time it struck, a golden hole opened up where it pierced the clouds. We watched for a long time as it crept its way across the land, like an animal come down from the heavens to stalk its prey. A breeze occasionally brought the sound of thunder to us, and then suddenly the stars and moon were gone, replaced by a sky as black as any I had ever seen, and then just as quickly the wind smacked into our campsite, and pelts of rain came stinging down upon us. “Wrap it up,” Mo yelled, as if we weren’t already grabbing bedrolls and running to shelter. Sedge and I veered toward one of the barns, but Mo headed toward the house, and without having time to think it over, Sedge and I changed directions. We joined Mo as he threw the door open and tumbled in behind him, slamming it against the rain and dumping our bedrolls on the floor.
The lightning flashed wildly now, and the thunder pounded simultaneously. Between the bright, white flashes Miss Doreen’s lamp cast a dim flickering circle of light onto the table next to her bed, the shadows of the painted hunting scene against the wall.
“Who are these people?” Miss Doreen called out in her thready voice.
“We jest takin’ shelter from the storm, Mizz . . .” Sedge answered, his sentence lost at the end in another boom of thunder.
“Who are these niggers?” she asked.
“One a white man,” Sedge replied.
Miss Doreen raised her head to look at us. The lightning flashed and made the interior of the cabin once again visible, and then suddenly it disappeared into darkness, save the lamp on her table.
“They look like niggers to me,” she said. “One looks like a dwarf. You know I don’t let any niggers in here but you. You and Janie. Where’s my gal Janie?” In the next flash of lightning I saw that she had laid her head back on the pillow.
“She done run off, ma’am.”
“Run off?” A boom of thunder. “I’ll have the hounds after her. I’ll have her whipped.”
“Ain’t no hounds, ma’am.” Boom. Boom.
“Mister Hill will know what to do. He’ll know what to do when the war’s over.” Boom. “Meanwhile, we just have to hang on, Sedge.”
The lightning flashed. The cabin shook with each roar of thunder.
“Yesem,” I heard Sedge say. In the next flash of lightning I saw him slumped down against the wall, sitting on the floor with his head between his knees. I sat down beside him, not wanting to take the only chair, the rocker that was pulled close to the hearth.
“Get some rope, Sedge,” Miss Doreen called. “Make me a noose. I believe I’ll just hang the bitch.” Boom. Boom. “Is that the Yankees?” she asked. “Is that the Yankees coming here?”
“No ma’am. That jest a thunderstorm,” Sedge whispered.
The lamp beside the bed sputtered its last flame and went out. Beside me I heard Sedge sigh. And then in the next frame of illumination from the lightning I saw Mo sit down in the rocking chair and pull his hat down over his eyes, resting his hands on his stomach. Soon I heard him snoring. There was more lightning and thunder. Miss Doreen muttered a few more sentences about the Yankees, and not to let them catch her. Sedge rose and went to her bedside. He held her hand and stroked it. “It jest a thunderstorm, Mizz Doreen. It be over soon.” He kept stroking her hand, and after she had fallen asleep he moved to his pallet and lay down, pulling the covers up over him, and soon I heard his own snores winding in with Mo’s.
I could not sleep. I stayed sitting on the floor. With each flash of lightning I noticed something new about the cabin. A vase of weedy wildflowers Sedge had brought in and placed on the mantel. A letter half-written on the small table next to the rocking chair, a pen and jar of dried ink sitting next to it. A man’s coat hung on the back of the door. And then Mo pushed his hat back. The cabin fell dark. In the next flash of lightning I saw the empty rocking chair moving back and forth. Darkness, and then Mo was walking across the floor toward Miss Doreen. In the next flare he was by her side. And darkness. And Mo was holding a pillow over Miss Doreen’s face.
Her hands came up to grip his wrists. Her legs kicked. Her body shuddered. In the next frame of light she lay still. Mo removed the pillow and gently lifted her head and placed it beneath, and then darkness. I heard him walk across the floor and stop in front of me, and squat down. Lightning flashed and I saw him there, looking at me, and then darkness, and he was gone. There and not there. There and not there. “Persy, you awake?” he whispered.
“Yes sir.”
“Do you know what jest happened?”
“Yes sir.”
“Tell me.”
> “You killed her,” I whispered.
“That ain’t what happened.” Mo leaned forward. Lightning flashed, his face close to mine now. “That ain’t what happened,” he said again.
Darkness and he wasn’t there anymore, but I could feel his breath, smell his tobacco.
“She died in the night,” Mo said in the darkness, and then there he was again. “You understand?”
Not there.
I didn’t answer.
There again.
“Goddamn it, Persy. You understand?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
“I’m trustin’ you to understand.”
“Yes sir.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“She died in the night.”
“Go to sleep.” He stood and went to the rocking chair, and settled in, stretching his stubby legs out in front of him and pulling his hat down over his eyes.
The storm stayed with us. I slept fitfully, the booms of thunder waking me up again and again. Each time I woke I watched in the flashes of lightning to see if Mo or Sedge had wakened. They slept through. It was not until the storm had moved on and morning dawned that Sedge discovered Miss Doreen’s death. I watched him cross the floor and go to her bed. He called her name softly. He lifted her hand and called her name again. He leaned over and laid his head against her chest, listening for her heartbeat. Then he stood straight up and looked at her, and reached over and closed her eyes, and pulled the sheet up over her face.
“She dead,” he said to the room.
Mo woke up, or pretended to. He pushed his hat back from his eyes and looked at Sedge.
“Mizz Doreen dead, Mistah Tilly.”
Mo stood and went to the bed. He leaned his ear against Miss Doreen’s chest and listened, then he straightened and put his arm around Sedge’s waist. “I reckon her time finally come,” he said.
Sedge started crying. “She warn’t always so bad.”
“Naw. I know that. You been good to her, Sedge. Better than the law required of you.”
I watched as Sedge leaned his head against Mo, his face resting on the top of Mo’s hat. Mo patted Sedge on the back and caught my eye. “You done yo’ duty,” he said. “It ain’t always easy to do what need doin’. I know that.” Mo still looked at me.
The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Page 18