Sorcerer's Apprentice

by Charles Johnson

  “Isaiah? You mean Izay-yah? He didn’t kill Izay-yah?”

  “Yeah, aw no! Not really—” His mind stuttered to a stop.

  “Whose fault is it then?” Harriet gawked at the African picking his nose in the wagon (Moses had, it’s true, not policed himself as well as he’d wanted). A shiver quaked slowly up her left side. She sloughed off her confusion, and flashed, “I can tell you whose fault it is, Moses. Yours! Didn’t I say not to bring that wild African here? Huh? Huh? Huh? You both should be—put to sleep.”

  “Aw, woman! Hesh up!” Moses threw down his hat and stomped it out of shape. “You just all upsetted.” Truth to tell, he was not the portrait of composure himself. There were rims of dirt in his nails. His trouser legs had blood splattered on them. Moses stamped his feet to shake road powder off his boots. “You got any spirits in the house? I need your he’p to untangle this thing, but I ain’t hardly touched a drop since I bought Mingo, and my throat’s pretty dr—”

  “You’ll just have to get it yourself—on the top shelf of the cupboard.” She touched her face, fingers spread, with a dazed gesture. There was suddenly in her features the intensity found in the look of people who have a year, a month, a minute only to live. “I think I’d better sit down.” Lowering herself onto her rocker, she cradled on her lap a volume by one M. Shelley, a recent tale of monstrosity and existential horror, then she demurely settled her breasts. “It’s just like you, Moses Green, to bring all your bewilderments to me.”

  The old man’s face splashed into a huge, foamy smile. He kissed her gently on both eyes, and Harriet, in return, rubbed her cheek like a cat against his gristly jaw. Moses felt lighter than a feather. “Got to have somebody, don’t I?”

  In the common room, Moses rifled through the cupboard, came up with a bottle of luke-warm bourbon and, hands trembling, poured himself three fingers’ worth in a glass. Then, because he figured he deserved it, he refilled his glass and, draining it slowly, sloshing it around in his mouth, considered his options. He could turn Mingo over to the law and let it go at that, but damned if he couldn’t shake loose the idea that killing the boy somehow wouldn’t put things to rights; it would be like they were killing Moses himself, destroying a part of his soul. Besides, whatever the African’d done, it was what he’d learned through Moses, who was not the most reliable lens for looking at things. You couldn’t rightly call a man responsible if, in some utterly alien place, he was without power, without privilege, without property—was, in fact, property—if he had no position, had nothing, or virtually next to nothing, and nothing was his product or judgment. “Be damned!” Moses spit. It was a bitter thing to siphon your being from someone else. He knew that now. It was like, on another level, what Liverspoon had once tried to deny about God and man: If God was (and now Moses wasn’t all that sure), and if He made the world, then a man didn’t have to answer for anything. Rape or murder, it all referred back to who-or-whatever was responsible for that world’s make-up. Chest fallen, he tossed away his glass, lifted the bottle to his lips, then nervously lit his pipe. Maybe…maybe they could run, if it came to that, and start all over again in Missouri, where he’d teach Mingo the difference between chicken hawks and strangers. But, sure as day, he’d do it again. He couldn’t change. What was was. They’d be running forever, across all space, all time—so he imagined—like fugitives with no fingers, no toes, like two thieves or yokefellows, each with some God-awful secret that could annihilate the other. Naw! Moses thought. His blood beat up. The deep, powerful stroke of his heart made him wince. His tobacco maybe. Too strong. He sent more whiskey crashing down his throat. Naw! You couldn’t have nothing and just go as you pleased. How strange that owner and owned magically dissolved into each other like two crossing shafts of light (or, if he’d known this, which he did not, particles, subatomic, interconnected in a complex skein of relatedness). Shoot him maybe, reabsorb Mingo, was that more merciful? Naw! He was fast; fast. Then manumit the African? Noble gesture, that. But how in blazes could he disengage himself when Mingo shored up, sustained, let be Moses’s world with all its sores and blemishes every time he opened his oily black eyes? Thanks to the trouble he took cementing Mingo to his own mind, he could not, by thunder, do without him now. Giving him his freedom, handing it to him like a rasher of bacon, would shackle Mingo to him even more. There seemed, just then, no solution.

  Undecided, but mercifully drunk now, his pipebowl too hot to hold any longer, Moses, who could not speak his mind to Harriet Bridgewater unless he’d tied one on, called out: “I come to a decision. Not about Mingo, but you’n’ me.” It was then seven o’clock. He shambled, feet shuffling, toward the door. “Y’know, I was gonna ask you to marry me this morning”—he laughed; whiskey made his scalp tingle—“but I figured living alone was better when I thoughta how married folks—and sometimes wimmin with dogs—got to favoring each other…like they was wax candles flowing tergether. Hee-hee.” He stepped gingerly, holding the bottle high, his ears brick red, face streaky from wind-dried sweat, back onto the quiet porch. He heard a moan. It was distinctly a moan. “Harriet? Harriet, I ain’t put it too well, but I’m asking you now.” On the porch her rocker slid back, forth, squeaking on the floorboards. Moses’s bottle fell—bip!—down the stairs, bounced out into the yard, rolled, and bumped into Harriet Bridge-water. Naw, he thought. Aw, naw. By the wagon, by a chopping block near a pile of split faggots, by the ruin of an old handpump caked with rust, she lay on her side, the back fastenings of her dress burst open, her mouth a perfect 0. The sight so wounded him he wept like a child. It was then seven-fifteen.

  October 7 of the year of grace 1855.

  Midnight found Moses Green still staring down at her. He felt sick and crippled and dead inside. Every shadowed object thinging in the yard beyond, wrenched up from its roots, hazed like shapes in a hallucination, was a sermon on vanity; every time he moved his eyes he stared into a grim homily on the deadly upas of race and relatedness. Now he had no place to stand. Now he was undone. “Mingo…come ovah heah.” He was very quiet.

  “Suh?” The lanky African jumped down from the wagon, faintly innocent, faintly diabolical. Removed from the setting of Moses’s farm, the boy looked strangely elemental; his skin had the texture of plant life, the stones of his eyes an odd, glossy quality like those of a spider, which cannot be read. “Talky old hen daid now, boss.”

  The old man’s face shattered. “I was gonna marry that woman!”

  “Naw.” Mingo frowned. From out of his frown a huge grin flowered. “You say—I’m quoting you now, suh—a man needs a quiet, patient, uncomplaining woman, right?”

  Moses croaked, “When did I say that?”

  “Yesstiday.” Mingo yawned. He looked sleepy. “Go home now, boss?”

  “Not just yet.” Moses Green, making an effort to pull himself to his full height, failed. “You lie face down—heah me?—with your hands ovah your head till I come back.” With Mingo hugging the front steps, Moses took the stairs back inside, found the flintlock Harriet kept in her cupboard on account of slaves who swore to die in the skin of freemen, primed it, and stepped back, so slowly, to the yard. Outside, the air seemed thinner. Bending forward, perspiring at his upper lip, Moses tucked the cold barrel into the back of Mingo’s neck, cushioning it in a small socket of flesh above the African’s broad shoulders. With his thumb he pulled the hammer back. Springs in the flintlock whined. Deep inside his throat, as if he were speaking through his stomach, he talked to the dark poll of the boy’s back-slanting head.

  “You ain’t never gonna understand why I gotta do this. You a saddle across my neck, always will be, even though it ain’t rightly all your fault. Mingo, you more me than I am myself. Me planed away to the bone! Ya understand?” He coughed and went on miserably: “All the wrong, all the good you do, now or tomorrow—it’s me indirectly doing it, but without the lies and excuses, without the feeling what’s its foundation, with all the polite make-up and apologies removed. It’s an empty gesture, like the s
wing of a shadow’s arm. You can’t never see things exactly the way I do. I’m guilty. It was me set the gears in motion. Me…” Away in the octopoid darkness a wild bird—a nighthawk maybe—screeched. It shot noisily away with blurred wings askirring when the sound of hoofs and wagons rumbled closer. Eyes narrowed to slits, Moses said—a dry whisper—“Get up, you damned fool.” He let his round shoulders slump. Mingo let his broad shoulders slump. “Take the horses,” Moses said; he pulled himself up to his rig, then sat, his knees together beside the boy. Mingo’s knees drew together. Moses’s voice changed. It began to rasp and wheeze; so did Mingo’s. “Missouri,” said the old man, not to Mingo but to the dusty floor of the buckboard, “if I don’t misre-member, is off thataway somewheres in the west.”

  EXCHANGE VALUE

  Me and my brother, Loftis, came in by the old lady’s window. There was some kinda boobytrap—boxes of broken glass—that shoulda warned us Miss Bailey wasn’t the easy mark we made her to be. She been living alone for twenty years in 4-B down the hall from Loftis and me, long before our folks died—a hincty, half bald West Indian woman with a craglike face, who kept her door barricaded, shutters closed, and wore the same sorry-looking outfit—black wingtip shoes, cropfingered gloves in winter, and a man’s floppy hat—like maybe she dressed half-asleep or in a dark attic. Loftis, he figured Miss Bailey had some grandtheft dough stashed inside, jim, or leastways a shoebox full of money, ’cause she never spent a nickel on herself, not even for food, and only left her place at night.

  Anyway, we figured Miss Bailey was gone. Her mailbox be full, and Pookie White, who run the Thirty-ninth Street Creole restaurant, he say she ain’t dropped by in days to collect the handouts he give her so she can get by. So here’s me and Loftis, tipping around Miss Bailey’s blackdark kitchen. The floor be littered with fruitrinds, roaches, old food furred with blue mold. Her dirty dishes be stacked in a sink feathered with cracks, and it looks like the old lady been living, lately, on Ritz crackers and Department of Agriculture (Welfare Office) peanut butter. Her toilet be stopped up, too, and, on the bathroom floor, there’s five Maxwell House coffee cans full of shit. Me, I was closing her bathroom door when I whiffed this evil smell so bad, so thick, I could hardly breathe, and what air I breathed was stifling, like solid fluid in my throatpipes, like broth or soup. “Coûter,” Loftis whisper, low, across the room, “you smell that?” He went right on sniffing it, like people do for some reason when something be smelling stanky, then took out his headrag and held it over his mouth. “Smells like something crawled up in here and died!” Then, head low, he slipped his long self into the living room. Me, I stayed by the window, gulping for air, and do you know why?

  You oughta know, up front, that I ain’t too good at this gangster stuff, and I had a real bad feeling about Miss Bailey from the get-go. Mama used to say it was Loftis, not me, who’d go places—I see her standing at the sideboard by the sink now, big as a Frigidaire, white flour to her elbows, a washtowel over her shoulder, while we ate a breakfast of cornbread and syrup. Loftis, he graduated fifth at DuSable High School, had two gigs and, like Papa, he be always wanting the things white people had out in Hyde Park, where Mama did daywork sometimes. Loftis, he be the kind of brother who buys Esquire, sews Hart, Schaffner & Marx labels in Robert Hall suits, talks properlike, packs his hair with Murray’s; and he took classes in politics and stuff at the Black People’s Topographical Library in the late 1960s. At thirty, he make his bed military-style, reads Black Scholar on the bus he takes to the plant, and, come hell or high water, plans to make a Big Score. Loftis, he say I’m ’bout as useful on a hustle—or when it comes to getting ahead—as a headcold, and he says he has to count my legs sometimes to make sure I ain’t a mule, seeing how, for all my eighteen years, I can’t keep no job and sortâ stay close to home, watching TV, or reading World’s Finest comic books, or maybe just laying dead, listening to music, imagining I see faces or foreign places in water stains on the wallpaper, ’cause some days, when I remember Papa, then Mama, killing they-selves for chump change—a pitiful li’l bowl of porridge—I get to thinking that even if I ain’t had all I wanted, maybe I’ve had, you know, all I’m ever gonna get.

  “Cooter,” Loftis say from the living room. “You best get in here quick.”

  Loftis, he’d switched on Miss Bailey’s bright, overhead living room lights, so for a second I couldn’t see and started coughing—the smell be so powerful it hit my nostrils like coke—and when my eyes cleared, shapes come forward in the light, and I thought for an instant like I’d slipped in space. I seen why Loftis called me, and went back two steps. See, 4-B’s so small if you ring Miss Bailey’s doorbell, the toilet’d flush. But her living room, webbed in dust, be filled to the max with dollars of all denominations, stacks of stock in General Motors, Gulf Oil, and 3M Company in old White Owl cigar boxes, battered purses, or bound in pink rubber bands. It be like the kind of cubbyhole kids play in, but filled with…things: everything, like a world inside the world, you take it from me, so like picturebook scenes of plentifulness you could seal yourself off in here and settle forever. Loftis and me both drew breath suddenly. There be unopened cases of Jack Daniel’s, three safes cemented to the floor, hundreds of matchbooks, unworn clothes, a fuel-burning stove, dozens of wedding rings, rubbish, World War II magazines, a carton of a hundred canned sardines, mink stoles, old rags, a birdcage, a bucket of silver dollars, thousands of books, paintings, quarters in tobacco cans, two pianos, glass jars of pennies, a set of bagpipes, an almost complete Model A Ford dappled with rust, and, I swear, three sections of a dead tree.

  “Damn!” My head be light; I sat on an upended peach crate and picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “Don’t you touch anything!” Loftis, he panting a little; he slap both hands on a table. “Not until we inventory this stuff.”

  “Inventory? Aw, Lord, Loftis,” I say, “something ain’t right about this stash. There could be a curse on it.…”

  “Boy, sometime you act weak-minded.”

  “For real, Loftis, I got a feeling.…”

  Loftis, he shucked off his shoes, and sat down heavily on the lumpy arm of a stuffed chair. “Don’t say any thing.” He chewed his knuckles, and for the first time Loftis looked like he didn’t know his next move. “Let me think, okay?” He squeezed his nose in a way he has when thinking hard, sighed, then stood up and say, “There’s something you better see in that bedroom yonder. Cover up your mouth.”

  “Loftis, I ain’t going in there.”

  He look at me right funny then. “She’s a miser, that’s all. She saves things.”

  “But a tree?” I say. “Loftis, a tree ain’t normal!”

  “Cooter, I ain’t gonna tell you twice.”

  Like always, I followed Loftis, who swung his flashlight from the plant—he a night watchman—into Miss Bailey’s bedroom, but me, I’m thinking how trippy this thing is getting, remembering how, last year, when I had a paper route, the old lady, with her queer, crablike walk, pulled my coat for some change in the hallway, and when I give her a handful of dimes, she say, like one of them spooks on old-time radio, “Thank you, Co-o-oter,” then gulped the coins down like aspirin, no lie, and scurried off like a hunchback. Me, I wanted no parts of this squirrely old broad, but Loftis, he holding my wrist now, beaming his light onto a low bed. The room had a funny, museumlike smell. Real sour. It was full of dirty laundry. And I be sure the old lady’s stuff had a terrible string attached when Loftis, looking away, lifted her bedsheets and a knot of black flies rose. I stepped back and held my breath. Miss Bailey be in her long-sleeved flannel nightgown, bloated, like she’d been blown up by a bicycle pump, her old face caved in with rot, flyblown, her fingers big and colored like spoiled bananas. Her wristwatch be ticking softly beside a half-eaten hamburger. Above the bed, her wall had roaches squashed in little swirls of bloodstain. Maggots clustered in her eyes, her ears, and one fist-sized rat hissed inside her flesh. My eyes snapped shut. My knees failed; then I did
a Hollywood faint. When I surfaced, Loftis, he be sitting beside me in the living room, where he’d drug me, reading a wrinkled, yellow article from the Chicago Daily Defender.

  “Listen to this,” Loftis say. “‘Elnora Bailey, forty-five, a Negro housemaid in the Highland Park home of Henry Conners, is the beneficiary of her employer’s will. An old American family, the Conners arrived in this country on the Providence shortly after the voyage of the Mayflower. The family flourished in the early days of the 1900s.’…” He went on, getting breath: “‘A distinguished and wealthy industrialist, without heirs or a wife, Conners willed his entire estate to Miss Bailey of 3347 North Clark Street for her twenty years of service to his family.’…” Loftis, he give that Geoffrey Holder laugh of his, low and deep; then it eased up his throat until it hit a high note and tipped his head back onto his shoulders. “Cooter, that was before we was born! Miss Bailey kept this in the Bible next to her bed.”