“Only the mind grows old. You are already tighter, more solid than you were as a child. There will be no grey hair, no aching limbs, no wound that does not heal.”
“And the sun?”
“A danger. It can weaken you, even take you to the true death. But it needn’t do that unless you give yourself up to it or are already ill. The soil of your birthplace will protect you. All new garments can be constructed to discreetly contain pockets of it. Other things—your cloak, your shoes, all laced with your earth—will serve you. You needn’t fear small doses of sun unless you’re unprotected. It may even become your ally when you wish to let go of life.”
As always, when Bird spoke of something that reminded her of the past she ended the discussion and turned abruptly to some other task. Gilda longed to ask Bird why the other had left them, but anytime she started to voice the question, Bird withdrew. So Gilda contented herself with lessons in the new ways of life and new languages. She had just begun to grow used to the altered rhythm of her life, to the speed and strength of her limbs, to her vision which pierced mortal duplicity, and to the reality of their isolation, when Bird announced her departure.
Gilda bitterly regretted never having confronted Bird, never demanding to know why Bird blamed her for the other’s death. Instead she’d waved good-bye stolidly from her upstairs window as Bird rode away. When Gilda still found herself, after some time, listening for Bird’s voice among those of the others, when she could no longer endure the earth and lavender scent of Bird’s room without collapsing in dry sobs, she deeded Woodard’s to Bernice’s youngest daughter and started northward.
On her third night of leisurely travel Gilda built a fire in a dark clearing beside the road. She took in the warmth as she gazed at the flames but was more absorbed by the portentous shapes and shadows. In that circle of heat and light the dark, chilling shape of her life found Gilda. Panic settled on her shoulders, obliterating the past and the future. Without Bird she was floating out of control on a dangerous sea. Once again she needed to give shape to a world that was beyond her comprehension, much as she had been forced to do when her mother died. She sat before the roadside fire trying to gain a focus, some sense of anticipation, but she found no grounding for them. The wind and flame were too free. It was then she pulled out a map and began to plot her journey—marking places where she should hide caches of her soil, choosing things she wanted to see. The plains of Texas, the towering trees of California, the many communities of freed blacks. Including her stay with Sorel and Anthony, she had spent almost half a century on the road before arriving in Rosebud.
Gilda closed her journal and looked around the room, her eyes picking out the few things she’d saved from Woodard’s: a colorful quilt, the small desk at which she now sat, the rows of books that lined the wall. Her trunk still held the metal cross her mother had given her and the leather-encased knife from Bird. These possessions were the legacy of a few short years and more lifetimes than most others would ever know. She shut the door of her sleeping room and the front door of the house, then walked east, slowly trying to reconstruct the time that had passed.
The years with Sorel—learning as much as there was time to absorb, from financial investing to Eastern philosophy—were as pristinely clear as her language lessons with Bird. She could feel the damp air on her skin from the evening walks with Anthony on fog-enshrouded piers. The vision of Eleanor, her scarlet hair dimming the lamplight, still took away her breath.
But many of the years were simply a broad strip of darkness into which she peered, out of which she could draw little. Whenever she wanted to remember them she read through her journal as she had just done, but still they held little meaning for her. Most decades were dazed watercolor views sketched from a distance. They provided a precise narrative of journeys but few sensations.
Tonight the full moon illuminated the road, making it feel like dusk, so Gilda moved cautiously off to the side into the thickets. On the road, or in the anonymity of St. Louis, she would take her share of the blood and then return to her books and papers to ex-
amine her memories. Her dark skin remained unlined, just as Bird had said it would. Her thick black hair, which she now wore pulled tightly back and tied in a bun at the nape of her neck, was still as dark as brushed velvet.
She moved speedily through the night, unafraid of animals or the nightriders who prowled looking for blacks whose lives were their sport. She slowed and lifted her face toward the moon. Her eyes closed. She was an eerie worshipper, part of the secret lore of ha’nts and spirits that lived with African people, even in Missouri. In the half-light Gilda felt the moon’s warmth as she had once felt the scorch of the sun on her back in the fields. But here the warmth was a fascination. Once taken for granted, the moon was now the center of her orbit.
She resisted the impulse to reach out for Bird, to try to touch her consciousness wherever she might be. Too often since their separation Gilda had come to a dead-end road trying to scan the miles.
She had almost agreed with Sorel when she left California that her task now was simply to live. As she did so, among the free blacks on farms and in small towns, she came closer to knowing, through them, who she was. Her preternatural life made her an outsider, but still she enjoyed their evocation of the secrets of the past and their unequivocal faith in the future. Gilda was chagrined by her concept of they and how her life separated her from them. Still she took comfort in the familiar smells and sounds and the rare sense of unity that sometimes crept into her.
Gilda moved away from these thoughts by opening her eyes and beginning her sprint toward the city. Before she could quite pull away, another sensation washed over her. A restlessness, much like the angry flower that had grown inside of Bird. Gilda didn’t know its root, but the need to move on, to look elsewhere for something still undefined, was like a hard wind at her back. The faint stirrings of the anxious hunger inside her turned her mind toward the blood that would replenish her life. Unconsciously, however, she planned what direction she’d follow next, not considering how she would force herself to part from Aurelia.
She had already stepped back onto the road intent on fulfilling the stirring inside her when she saw two men on horseback approaching from the west. They were moving at a good pace, as if racing, but they slowed when they noticed her and pulled up short a few feet away. One swung down from the saddle immediately. He stood before her with an angry glare that quickly turned into a leer when he realized she was not a man.
“This here’s a niggah gal, we got here. What you doin’ out on the road this hour?”
Gilda didn’t respond but let herself breathe in the smell of the horses and sense their anxiety and dissatisfaction with their masters. There was an idle communication between them and her that went unnoticed by the riders. Gilda felt reassured by the horses’ solid presence, their lack of malevolence, and their easy response to comforting messages she sent them. The other horseman dismounted holding a glistening whip coiled at his hip.
“Maybe we teach one more niggah a lesson tonight, hey Cook?” Gilda peered at the braided leather, dark with blood she could smell. She wondered who had been their most recent pupil.
“Yeah, Zach, I think there’s a lesson here for sure.”
Gilda still didn’t move or speak. She stood as if frozen, but her mind flooded with the words Bird had given her. She was not afraid as she had been that night long ago in the root cellar. She tasted the acid of hatred inside her mouth and wanted to be full of it, to teach the lesson these two needed to learn.
“She must be mute, Zach. Don’t seem to talk, do she?”
The taller man moved close to Gilda and yanked her hair, pulling her face up toward his. The moonlight glistened on her dark skin. Before he could press his advantage, Gilda grabbed his wrist, the crack of bone audible in the night. She pulled his hand from her head and twisted it behind his back, raising it so high the pain cut his voice before he could scream. She gave a sharp twist and let go on
ly when she felt his muscles quaking with pain. He whipped around toward her again, and she smashed the side of his face with her fist. The snap of his neck broke through the night as his body crumpled into the ditch beside the road.
His fellow rider backed away, reaching behind him for the reins of his horse, but his mount deliberately twisted out of his reach and Gilda was upon him before he realized his position. She caught his whip in her left hand and pulled him backward. He fell to the ground, then scurried back off the road to the brush with Gilda bounding behind him. She cracked the whip once over his head, then lay a stroke across his back. That she hit him with his own whip seemed to startle him more than the pain. At the second lash he turned to face Gilda, his eyes filled with rage. He gasped when he saw the swirling amber of her eyes and the sinewy strength of her body, thinking that they’d been wrong, that it was a man. An Indian he thought, confused by the moonlight and his own fear. She cracked the whip this time across his chest, then his cheek, opening the flesh almost to the bone.
Gilda threw the whip down and leapt upon him, twisting his head to expose the pulsing vein in his neck. He was already faint with shock, yet Gilda sensed his disbelieving terror build. She scraped his flesh roughly with her nails and watched the blood pulse from his neck, searching for what he felt when he lay open the flesh of men. Her chest swelled with anticipation as she understood the terrible joy he experienced at demanding terror and death. She drew his blood into her quickly and then let him slip to the ground. She watched the blood continue to stream from his neck, soaking into the muddy ditch. She could feel life ebbing from him and was shocked at the excitement it aroused. One death was enough. It had been so long since she’d been caught unawares like this. She knelt beside him, holding her hands to the wounds on his neck and cheek until the bleeding stopped.
She left him nothing in exchange except a simple recollection of falling instead of the horror of the real memory. His breath was shallow, but he was no longer in danger.
Gilda was sickened by her anger and the thrill the confrontation had given her. It was the nightmarish pleasure she had seen in Eleanor’s eyes and the one she feared could become hers. She climbed back up to the road and stared down at the face of the one who was dead, frozen in the moonlight. She took in his features as she’d been taught and tried to absorb some sense of his true spirit. This was only the second one. His image now took its place beside the other in a corner inside herself that Gilda seldom visited. The first one had been taken on a road not unlike this one, in the dark when mortals seemed to feel that what was done was not seen. She had not talked with anyone about that time, not even Sorel or Anthony. Just as she wouldn’t speak of this death until she could talk of it with Bird.
She turned back toward her farm. Instead of her usual swift pace, Gilda took each step with deliberation. She was leaden with exhaustion. Anger had flared and burned out leaving the taste of ashes. One death. She was grateful it had not been two. When she finally arrived home she eagerly sponged the blood from her hands and face. The memory of her rage and the death made her tremble, so she avoided her desk and its temptation to record her anguish. Instead she sank into the earth-filled comforter, flying into the arms of dreamless sleep.
On Saturday Gilda paced impatiently about her house looking at maps and rereading her journals. She missed Anthony and the stern talks he’d had with her to save Sorel the pain of them. She even missed Eleanor and the coolly seductive attitude she had taken toward her after the fight with Samuel. It had helped Gilda maintain an alertness as she learned the ways of the city and the others who were like them.
Gilda waited until late in the afternoon before pulling out the purple outfit Eleanor had given her, spun from fine wool and the Mississippi soil protecting her from the fading sunlight. She went out to her garden to harvest the last of the beans that neighbors had encouraged her not to grow in this soil, then loaded her car with the bushel basket of corn, strawberries, and cucumbers to take to Aurelia. She knew most of the canning would be completed at this hour. Still, she’d made that her reason for this visit, and both Aurelia and Gilda found the pursuit of propriety a pleasant game to play.
The broad-brimmed felt hat she wore flopped down over her face leaving only her lips exposed in the amber light. She slapped the dust from her hem and decided she was presentable enough even though a fine grey film from her final sweep through the garden rimmed the soles of her boots. The cloak would hide it, she thought, if she should encounter anyone on the street, and Aurelia cared little for appearance. Or more precisely, her outlandish outfits seemed to appeal to Aurelia. Gilda decided to rinse her hands before leaving and was startled to hear a knock at her door just as she returned a towel to its rack.
There was a moment of terror when time eclipsed itself and it was again 1850. Gilda fought the panic barreling through her and searched her mind for who it might be. So rarely did she have visitors, and people did not ride this far out to visit unexpectedly at this hour, that Gilda was certain it must be Aurelia. She hurried to the front of the house trying to suppress a gnawing guilt at what Aurelia must have perceived as neglect.
She was surprised to see not Aurelia but her neighbor, John Freeman, whose farm lay further west. He was a tall, narrow man who filled the doorframe with his stiff coveralls and straw hat. Gilda was rankled by his presence but unsure why. He lived alone and worked his farm steadily and was the only person, other than Aurelia, to have ever been inside Gilda’s home. Sometimes he stopped by to stand at the porch railing exchanging the small talk that was part of the ritual of farm life. Occasionally she’d discover a peck of beans on her porch or a bottle of the homemade wine for which Freeman was famous. She smiled at the memory of the rough wine that had made her feel so warm and opened the door wider.
“Well, Brother Freeman, this is a pure surprise. Have you come to continue in your efforts to persuade me with your wine to the ways of the devil?” She said this laughing as she stepped out onto the porch.
He was a reed-thin man with—at first glance—a stern demeanor, the effect of working in the sun all day. At the slightest encouragement his eyes opened wide, and his smile rose shyly from deep within brown furrows. Although he knew little about Gilda he’d taken to her from the time he first saw her squinting into the sunset three years earlier.
“No ma’am,” he said in a deep voice echoing miraculously from his long neck. “That’s not ’til next harvest. I expect the berries to be sweeter than ever too.” Gilda sat in one of the porch’s ladder-back chairs and indicated the other for Freeman.
“You know, Miss Gilda, I need to ask your thought on something,” he said, ignoring the chair, “but I’ma hope you ain’t peeved ’cause these ideas come up.”
“I can think of few ideas you might have, Mr. Freeman, that would make me angry.”
He began slowly, phrasing his words carefully for this peculiar woman who appeared to live outside of their world and to hide her own universe beneath her hat brims. “Well, you probably know that Miss Aurelia got this notion in her head to minister to the poor. Not that I’m against it, but she’s took into her mind to maybe start a class or a school for them that’s just up from down south and them Indians that live north of town and God knows what all! She’s even talking about…” He broke off there, embarrassed, then went on. “Well, you probably know something ’bout all this. You two is big talkers, I know.”
“I thought it a fine project, myself,” Gilda asserted, then held her silence.
“I agree, Miss Gilda, you ain’t gonna get no arguin outta me on that account—”
“So what is it exactly, Mr. Freeman, we’re concerned about?” As Gilda spoke she gazed out from under her hat, casually catching John Freeman’s eyes. Exerting her will she corralled his thoughts, making it easier for him to be direct so they did not dance around his meaning for the next twenty minutes.
“Well, I just wondered if you thought it un…uh…unseemly for Miss Aurelia to have those people troupin�
� through her house, probably at night, and she’d be there alone and all. It just looks like the people in town might talk in some kinda way. You know they got nothin’ better to do but think on colored folks’ business. And you know white people think we’re all trash no matter who’s husband was a minister or a farmer or such like!”
Gilda laughed out loud at that. It became clear what caught her up short about this man: his carefully contained yet certainly passionate interest in Aurelia.
“In some ways you are right, of course, Mr. Freeman. Aurelia should not be left to bear the burden of this all on her own. Surely she should have someone to stand by her. We’ve discussed perhaps having the lessons out here at my farm sometimes, or even moving the lessons around to give others a chance to host—implicate everyone, in a manner of speaking,” Gilda said with a glistening smile. “But those are barely plans right now. And, Mr. Freeman, we can’t always be so concerned with the talk of our neighbors. Talk is mostly useless chatter that feeds no cows and brings no rain.”
“You got it right there!” John Freeman said, relieved that Gilda appeared to agree with him. He was unsure if Gilda’s participation made the idea more or less savory though. Everyone said two women were bound to get into even more trouble than one.
“I’m on my way to see Aurelia right now, so maybe she and I can discuss some of your suggestions.”
With that, Gilda pulled her front door tight and left her porch in long strides. John Freeman tumbled quickly behind and opened the car door while Gilda put on her goggles. She climbed in and moved the car onto the road as Freeman mounted his horse. He turned back toward his farm, frowning. Gilda’s words had been comforting, nonetheless, and odd as it seemed even to him, he had a lot of confidence in her.
Sitting in Aurelia’s kitchen, listening to her excited talk of the new venture, Gilda felt less certain about her ability to manage the situation.
The Gilda Stories Page 14