“Make me!” Lena pushed her chest out at Nevada.
Vergie rose from her seat. “I will make you if she does not,” Vergie said, and she started to move toward the aisle.
The schoolteacher, Ella, whispered to her cousin that Maze would be mortified if she saw Vergie conducting herself in such unladylike ways.
“Well, not as if this gathering is exactly high society,” her cousin whispered back.
They snickered among their group; then Miss Ma unleashed a stream of laughter. And then the yard-turned-chapel went still.
Two white men entered. Both in suits and top hats, both with billy clubs braced as if they were coming to quell an uprising, as if they had license to be here and the ones already here needed to ask permission of these white men to take their next breaths.
Kojo stood, his eyes on the one walking down the center aisle, his eye really on his billy club. He’d been hit with one before for no good cause other than they’d been searching for a thief and he was as good as anybody to use for their whipping boy. “Sirs?” Kojo said.
Then Skell stood, too. “May we help you?”
Then the husband to Ella’s cousin stood; the soloist who’d been prepared to sing the Lord’s Prayer stood; the one holding the harmonica stood; one by one, every man in the yard-turned-chapel stood, their faces ashen as if they were watching their own deaths approach, but standing nonetheless, ready if necessary to fight for themselves, to defend the women assembled here.
Vergie wanted to yell and curse at the white men intruding on their gathering, wanted to tell them to take their damn billy clubs and beat their own asses, wanted to fling her hand at them the way she’d flung her hand at the white men in the other boat. But she did not. She considered what the result would be the way she rarely considered the consequences of her unbridled temper. If she expressed how she felt this instant, one of the two would surely move in her direction, putting Skell and the other men in jeopardy because they’d be compelled to defend her and might end up with a head-bashing or worse.
She eased from her seat. She walked to the back of the yard-turned-chapel as she heard Miss Ma say, “Praise the Lord,” which stopped Vergie in her tracks, as Miss Ma was not known for making such proclamations. “You have come to investigate how we was shot at and nearly killed on the river. Praise the Lord, I say.” Then Nevada also joined her grandmother’s chants of “Praise the Lord,” then Skell joined in, then Kojo and his wife; one by one the entire gathering joined the chant, and Vergie marveled at the wiles of Miss Ma as she turned to leave the yard. “Praise the Lord,” she whispered to herself—the saying it helped wrestle down her temper, which had so wanted her to shake a fist at the white men who’d barged in on their sacred time. She walked away from the yard. Wished she’d been able to reason with her temper when they’d been on that boat the way she’d done just now. Everything did not have to be a fight, at least not her fight, her aunt Maze had tried to impress that on her. Sometimes it was better to turn away, walk away, as she was doing now.
She was walking in circles, she realized, because she’d come several times already to this part of the shallow creek where the rocks made a bridge. She decided this time to cross—slipped her shoes from her feet and lifted the hem of her dress and stepped from rock to rock. She could see tadpoles just below the surface of the water shimmying like fast girls. A floating bloom of coral honeysuckle served as a raft for a family of hummingbirds. Their journey kept her occupied until she reached the other side. She walked past the main house and the mansions that served as Ledoff’s and the doctor’s private quarters. She stood on the pier, flanked by the barges. The sun was sinking lower in the sky, leaving a trail of red and yellow. The air smelled of wet pine and fish oil. The blue-gray river lurched in spots as if it was trying to reach up and steal some of the sunset’s color, as if it was tired of being blue and gray and wanted the feel of orange.
She started walking again. She was passing the hospital, but she didn’t allow her head to turn in that direction, lest she fall into despair all over again about Carl. His condition must have deteriorated for Spence to miss his own wedding. She was falling into despair anyhow. Now she faced the curing shack, where Sylvia had told her that Linc had spent the night. She peeped in. The sight of the chains bolted to the wall drew her all the way in. The ceiling was low and she had to practically stoop once she crossed the threshold. It smelled of mud and mint, and she guessed the mint aroma came from the sheet folded neatly on the cot. Bay, who did the laundry here, had a penchant for drizzling oil of peppermint into everything she washed. Just above the cot were the chains. Vergie had grown up with stories about the liberators of the enslaved and as a child she would fantasize that she was the most famous liberator of all, Black Moses. She’d imagine herself shooting down the overseers trying to foil their escape; taking hatchets to chains such as these. She fingered the metal, it was hard and cold as death. She tried to imagine these chains bolting her to the wall, but she couldn’t. A knot of guilt rose up in her throat and she swallowed hard. She knew that had she been born as she was four score sooner and two states south, she still wouldn’t know the feel of these chains. She’d know the big house. The beds there. Welt marks on her spine not from a whip but from the rough friction of the sheets, the proprietor’s breath pushing in her ear like knife stabs, his sweat like acid burning through her skin all the way to the bone.
She put both her hands through the circle the chain made and sat on the cot and swung her feet around and reclined. She closed her eyes. She still couldn’t imagine it, even as the metal dug into her wrist and the pain of it shot through her arms and the line of anger widened. “How dare they!” she said out loud. “Hate-filled ravagers.” She saw herself again, flicking her hand at the two on the boat because she knew they’d said some disparaging thing about them. How many disparaging things had she heard, even from the ones who covered their prejudices under the veneer of politeness? Her flick of the wrist had been for them, too; for every time she’d moved seamlessly through the parlors when she’d assist her aunt and uncle as they catered lavish affairs for one of their white clients and they thought her white and she’d had to endure overheard talk about the smaller brain, larger teeth, penchant to steal, animalistic, work-averse, rhythmically proficient, overly natured, the dear, sweet, loyal, mammified Negro. She’d seen them crammed into that other boat, too, when she’d flicked her wrist. And right now that might be what was costing Carl his life. She pressed her wrists deeper against the cold metal that dug into her skin. She knew that she could pull her hands from these chains at any time, so she allowed the hurt and pressed them deeper still.
27
LINC WAS PREPARING to leave the Lazaretto. He’d just met with Sylvia, who’d taken him into Ledoff’s study and shown him the meticulously kept log and assured him that Bram could not be there. She asked him again who had directed him to the Lazaretto. “It does not matter,” he said as he looked out the window and watched the river lapping by. She offered him transportation back to the city on a ferry due in shortly. “If not that, there will be another shortly after, though that one will be an emergency run to get Carl to a hospital in Philadelphia.” He accepted her offer. Then she excused herself, said that she had to ready Carl for transport. He thanked her again, started what felt like a long trek to the pier to await the ferry. He patted his shirt pocket, then looked through his satchel and realized that he’d left his tobacco in the shack where he’d slept. He reversed course. The trip back to Philadelphia without knowledge of Bram would be even more of a torture without a smoke.
He breathed in deeply as he walked toward the shack. Given the circumstances, he thought that at least the open space here had done him some good. In New York his room faced a crowded alley that smelled perpetually of burning rags, or wood, or charcoal. When he thought about it, gray predominated there; as if he lived in only two dimensions. At least until night caught and he made his way over to the Tenderloin section with its sensory delu
ge and he’d see color everywhere: in the clothes, and the food, and the drink, and the way the conversation splashed in unanticipated directions—even the danger had a color. And every night that he was up there, he was thrilled by it. It reminded him sometimes of Buddy’s house, except that Buddy’s house had the added bonus of familiarity. He felt as if he was part of a family at Buddy’s. Even though he wasn’t really, he felt that he was.
As he approached the shed he noticed for the first time the pop of yellow and white wildflowers that bordered the path to the entrance. Birds chattered away, and he thought he even heard a woodpecker as he stepped inside. He stopped then. There was Vergie, stretched out on the cot. Her long dress hung in volumes over the sides of the cot and in the second that it took his eye to move from the hint of her ankle along the length of the dress, he imagined himself covering her even more perfectly than the endless fabric did. He asked himself why was she here like this if not to entice him to do what he’d been yearning to do since their first encounter in the parlor. Imagined it now as his eyes took in her slender waist, the mild elevation of her breasts, her hair, which was spread out in waves on the cot, her eyes closed, her mouth pursed. He thought he would explode when he looked at her mouth—that mouth that had caused him to say he was a black man, her substantial lips, the tilt of her chin. Then he saw the chains, both of her hands inside the circle of chain, and he gasped. He was paralyzed at first as he told himself that he could not be seeing this. She could not be chained to the wall. And yet she was. He ran to her then, calling her name as he did.
She opened her eyes with a jolt. “Oh my God,” she said when she saw him standing over her. His expression was frozen and horrified, not unlike Nevada’s and Miss Ma’s that morning when she’d chopped away at her hair.
“Who did this?” he asked, as he pulled her hands from the circle the chain made. He stopped then as he held on to her hands, his face a mix of relief and confusion when he realized that the chains had not actually held her shackled.
“Please tell me you stretched yourself here like this,” he said, as Vergie slipped her hands from his hold and swung her feet around and sat all the way up. “Otherwise tell me who did, so I will know who I am about to stomp to his death.” His voice was low as he struggled to keep an even tone. The sight of her like that had made a wavy line of his breathing.
Vergie rubbed her wrists. They were blue in places from the chains’ indentation. “I feel foolish,” she said, concentrating on her wrists. “Please walk out and come back in again and pretend that you are seeing me for the first time.”
“The first time this hour? Or the first time ever?”
“Does it matter?”
“Well, if it is the first time ever, I must find an owl to drop me in—what was it? Cow dung? Is that not how you characterized my appearance when we first met?”
“That was unkind of me,” she said. She shifted on the cot. She looked down at the dirt floor. And then she cried. It was a hawking cry. When she was younger, her aunt Maze had tried to teach her to cry pretty. Had told her that one day she’d find herself needing to cry in the presence of a handsome man, and she should lightly dab her eyes with her handkerchief and allow only a wisp of a soprano sound from her throat, not all the nose-snorting that was her custom. That lesson had been lost on Vergie. Right now she made gagging, slobbering sounds as she spit and blew her nose.
Linc just stood there in the middle of the shack, partially leaning so his head wouldn’t scrape the ceiling. His feet were plastered to the dirt floor because he didn’t know what to do. He considered going to Vergie to attempt to comfort her, but he was wary about her mental state. For all he knew she could be an absolute loon. Why else would she purposely shackle herself? But then he couldn’t just stand here and watch her cry. “Fish or cut bait,” Bram would say. He felt a pang as he thought about Bram. He wanted to do as Vergie was doing right now, he wanted to weep. But all he could do was grab his smokes and leave, head back to town and start his search for Bram again there. For all he knew, Bram could be back in New York by now. He could be in his room, in a trance, talking to the dead. The image comforted him as he looked around for his pouch of tobacco and saw it peeping under the sheet he’d folded. Vergie was practically sitting on it.
“Uh, Vergie,” he half-spoke, half-whispered her name.
She made a honking sound as she blew her nose and then looked up. He thought the sound provocative because it was so unexpected, so unladylike that it reached all the way inside of him.
“My, uh, my tobacco—it is there.” He pointed right at the spot where her hip met the cot.
She followed Linc’s eyes to the outline of her hip. She removed the pouch from under her. “I do apologize,” she said as she handed him the pouch. “And my display of hysteria is unforgivable.”
“Unforgivable only because there’s nothing to forgive,” Linc said, as he took the tobacco and dropped it in his bag. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his arms were dark with hair, and Vergie’s gaze followed the length of his arms.
“I should not be here, intruding on your space, such as it is,” Vergie said, as she dabbed at her eyes—finally. “I saw the chains and I was drawn to inspect them. The thought of the awfulness wrought by those chains.”
A field mouse darted through the shed, just avoiding the hem of Vergie’s dress. Vergie pulled her foot back to allow it to pass. Linc had never been in the company of a woman who reacted so calmly to a scampering mouse. Nor one who looked at him as directly as she did now. No demure lowered head, no batting of the eyes. Straight on she looked at him as if they were equal in every way. He felt a surge then, like the surge he’d gotten when he’d seen her for the first time. The intensity of it weakened him and he needed to sit. “May I?” he asked as he pointed to a spot on the cot.
“It is your mat,” Vergie said as she pulled her sprawling skirts in to accord him space.
Linc sat. He tried to relax, but he felt wooden, back erect, hands on his knees, looking straight ahead to where a spit of light pushed in between two slats. “You are right,” he said, “about the awfulness wrought by chains like those. My mother told us stories when we were young that brought us to tears. Now it just evokes rage that rises up in me. Once I heard a white man calling two orphan kids river rats spawned from niggers. I was across the way and I barreled over to him and I told him that I was offended, that any upstanding person should be offended, and I hit him so hard, I knocked him into a coma. He has survived to this day in quite an unholy condition.” He didn’t know why he told her that skewed version of what truly happened, didn’t know why he was telling her such a thing at all.
“Good,” Vergie said. “Good for you.” She sat up and punched her fists in the air. “I guess that they thought you white. I imagine how they would have strung you from a tree if they knew that you were a black man. My error has been that I have expressed my rage without hiding the fact that I am a Negro, and I have paid dearly as a result.”
“And you should not have to hide your race, Vergie. You should not,” he said it with emphasis, the irony not lost on him.
She sighed. “I just wish—ah, dear Carl . . .” she said, and then she went quiet.
“Tell me about Carl,” he said, practically whispering. “How is he faring?”
“I cannot. It will cause another outburst.”
“Is he alive?”
“He is.”
“Well, there is hope then. As long as there is life, there’s the possibility that life can continue. Life wants to keep on drumming to the living beat.” He quoted Meda as he felt the tightness in his muscles ease a bit. He sat back some and concentrated on a single ant he saw marching across the wall, trying to replicate the movement of its colony so that it could find its way home; it leaned back as if it had made a great discovery and then disappeared into a seam of the wall. A woodpecker knock-knocked just outside of the shed; a breeze pushed the leaves to a melody of whooshing sounds.
“Tha
t is a nice thought,” Vergie said, “life wanting to keep on drumming to the living beat. Sounds like something my aunt Maze might say.”
He looked at Vergie and smiled. Vergie thought his smile honest the way it involved his entire face; a sadness hung in his eyes, though, and she asked him if he had located his brother. “My cousin told me that she saw you at the creek and that you were looking for someone and she told you to meet her at the barge.”
“She did,” he said, as he sat up straighter. “Though I confess, the sound of the music drew me to your party, plus I sensed that was where the beautiful women were.”
Vergie stared at him straight on and pulled her full lips to one side in a smirk. Her reaction was different from most of the women he’d complimented like that; they’d giggle or turn red or at least lower their eyes.
“I apologize,” he said. “I could not resist. You are beautiful. And did the wedding go off without a hitch?” he asked. Asked it quickly before Vergie could react.
“Can you fathom that there has been no wedding?” she said, relieved that he’d moved beyond calling her beautiful.
“No wedding? What happened?”
“The bride was jilted. Well, not actually jilted. The groom had official business. I suppose the result is the same.”
“The groom? Spence?”
“Ah, yes, Spence. So you were observant during breakfast?”
“Well, Spence I did not actually meet, I just know of him because of his absence. Mora is the bride, Lena is her sister who has a penchant for one-upmanship and a special affection for Carl. Miss Ma is Nevada’s grandmother. Skell is the voice of reason. Kojo is the strongman. And Splotch is a, a—” he stopped himself. “So what was the reaction of the folks who traveled all this way for a wedding that got put on ice.”
“As you might imagine, the reaction went from confused to disappointed to livid, but even that got cut short when we were rushed by the police.”
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