by Laird Hunt
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be any help to you.”
“And I’m sorry for having troubled your afternoon.”
“You have other places to visit for your newspaper article?”
“Just this one.”
I had turned and started across the lawn. I had begun to walk back to my car, to return from nothing to nothing, the air, the road, the long drive back, when she spoke.
“My parents were Christian people,” she said.
I stopped.
“They said the good Lord saw no color when he looked down at us.”
I had put my hat back on. I took it off again.
“No color at all.”
I nodded. She looked carefully at me.
“You don’t look anything like a reporter,” she said.
I nodded again.
She stood without moving for a long time, then she clicked her tongue and gave me a small, careful smile.
We crossed what had once possibly been a sorghum field, then followed a path down a gulley, through a notch between two hills and into a pretty stand of oak, willow, and birch. I took my hat off and held it against my chest when she pointed. Two or three dozen moss-dripping markers sat surrounded by the remnants of an iron fence. The markers were cross-shaped. Made of pink granite most of them.
“Some didn’t make it across the river. My parents buried every last one.”
I nodded. I’d heard about that.
“Who you looking for?” she said.
“Her name was Cleome.”
“No Cleomes here,” she said.
I was walking the markers, the woman stepping quietly behind me.
“I know every name. If they had one. Josiah, Eunice, Claremont, Osa, Letty, Brister, Dorcas, Jupiter, Pompey, Fanny, Turquoise, Lince.”
I turned. The woman had stopped. Was looking up at me.
“What’s your given name?”
I told her.
“We’ve met before.”
I shook my head, smiled. She did not.
“I used to ride the boat when they made the crossing. My daddy said we were doing Christian work. Told me to come along. You got your name on that boat. Your aunt called it out. We all heard it.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
“They burned my parents out during the war. Said they were helping other people’s property escape. They hung my daddy from a tree.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“My mother rebuilt. She lived to be a hundred.”
I nodded.
“That’s your mother there.”
I followed her arm to a marker at the back of the cemetery. She let me walk over alone. There was moss in the grooves but the inscription could still be read.
Mother of Prosper
1861
“My daddy went out and found her where she passed. Brought her here on the mule wagon. She got her Christian rights as best as they could be given.”
It took me a long time to be able to speak. I used my first voice when I did.
“Then I’m obliged to your father.”
“No,” she said. “No, you aren’t.”
“Then to you.”
“Not to me either.”
She started to walk back the way they had come, called over her shoulder as she was walking: “There’s room for her name on there. I know a stonecutter in town wouldn’t ask any questions.”
But I had already seen where I would make my first cut.
LUCIOUS
(AGONISTES)
1912
Here; swear then how thou escapedst
THERE IS A STORY goes with my name too. I was to have been called Joseph after the grand old man and be done with it. I was to have been Joseph Aloysius Wilson and that’s that. I was fresh born and on the earth and had my name. Then my father had his vision. Out in the field in the middle of the bright sunshine with his eyes still open but for the blinks. In it just born as I was, he carried me on his back all the way to North Carolina where I had started my dark swim. My mother stayed behind in Indiana, and my father carried me away from barley and corn and back into cotton and tobacco. He followed the route they had taken in riding away from it all, and he knew the road every inch and mile. I did not cry on his back, just rode along like a soft doll, and when he was again on the farm they had left behind there was no one but a colored woman waiting there. All the others had gone like my parents had, and it was just an old colored woman he had never laid eyes on before. She was dressed in drab except for a crimson scarf. In her hands she held a package tied with string. My father reached for the package, but she shook her head, so he reached behind him and hefted me around and she put it in my hands. When she had completed this chore, she touched my forehead and nodded at my father and was gone.
“Well, open it,” my father told me, even though I had just been born. I opened it and fetched out a slip of paper had on it a single word.
“Lucious,” my father told my mother when he was awake to the world again and had got back to what wasn’t yet quite a house.
“He will be called Joseph as we planned. As he already is,” said my mother.
“Lucious is his name,” my father said.
“You just fell asleep and had a dream.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“His name is Joseph.”
“Lucious is what he will be called.”
My father said it one more time, and then he took up his musket and fired it out the window. And that was that, and when in after years I complained about my name no one knew how to say or spell, they would both of them tell me about my father’s vision. Didn’t stop me from hating it though. The way a child can hate a thing. Hate it to crying, to kicking, to gnashing of tumbledown milk teeth. You will understand why when one Sunday we passed a farm where a colored woman, first I had ever seen, was bent over in an oat field, I wrote my hated name down on a piece of paper and wrapped it up in a package and tied it with string. I waited until my parents weren’t likely to look for me and walked four miles back to that farm and handed it to the colored woman, who took it from me without a word.
“My name is Joseph. I don’t want your name,” I told her. She had green eyes and fine, long eyebrows and wore feathers and strips of string in her hair and was the strangest and handsomest woman I had ever seen.
“I gave it back,” I told my father that evening at supper.
“Gave back what?” my father said.
“My name.”
“To that red Indian girl?”
“Was she an Indian?”
That is the first part of the story of my name, and I have told it twice in my life to listeners hadn’t heard it before. The first time was during the war, when I was sick in love and there was a hurt soldier resting up in the little house I still have here on my property. He had been home to see his parents and was returning to the fight and had had a wound go bad on him. I was sick in love, and the one I was sick in love with was tending his wound and looking soft at him who was curly-haired and green-eyed and not at me who was just an already-old man owned some beasts and land, and when I went down there it was to try and see what it was that soldier had that I didn’t. Took about ten seconds to see that he had everything. Everything I was missing. Going back down to war. Probably to get killed. Thunder and glory. Sulfur and bayonet. Clear road to the beyond.
He was young and sick and asked me to hold his hand, grip it tight. I held his hand and told him the story of my name. He had his fever and didn’t hear it. I know because when the fever broke a week later, I asked him if he remembered what my name was supposed to have been, should have been, and when I smiled and asked this, he looked at me strange. So I bade him farewell and sent him down to rejoin his regiment on one of my good mules. As he rode off, the one I was sick in love with and who wasn’t sick or any other ways in love with me whispered out at him, “Good-bye, Joseph.”
She was the other I told the story to. I told it to
her not a season ago. In that same little house, which for the fifty years after that soldier’s leaving I saw to it was her house. Of course it is now no longer her house because she is also gone. Vanished up the chimney with its ash.
“I have always liked that name of yours,” she said. She was old and stout and rattled like a boiler, but she said it and dug a tear out of my eye.
“Call me Joseph,” I said. “Call me Joseph and I will call you Ginny, and we will be called by our true names.”
“My name is Sue. Add on Scary if you want.”
“I never called you Scary.”
“And your name is Lucious.”
“Why wouldn’t you have me?”
She was wearing a ring woven out of purple thread on one of her fingers. She did not give an answer. Had already given it. Lifetime ago. She pointed with that finger to a large, thick envelope with a Chicago send-back address printed on it in neat handwriting that was foreign to me. Then she pointed at a thicker stack of papers sitting near it, which she had covered in her own hand.
“There’s true stories there if you care to read them,” she said. “Mine and hers both. You know who it is I mean.”
Then she asked me if after she was gone I would send her stack, along with a word or two of my own if I wanted, to the Chicago address the thick envelope had sailed down to her from.
“Don’t you die on me, Sue,” I said.
“Swear to me you will send it,” she said.
“I swear it,” I said.
“Lucious. Lucious Wilson,” she said.
There is snow come up as I have told the story of my name. Snow and small smacks of hail on the roof of this little house.
I went then I came back then I went then I came back again. In going I came and in coming I went. In that way I didn’t need to see an inch of my road and might as well have took out my own eyes. But here they still are—candy jellies, each afloat, each in its own glass jar.
COLOPHON
Kind One was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis.
The text is set in Goudy Village.
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OTHER BOOKS BY LAIRD HUNT
Ray of the Star
978-1-56689-232-2
In a dreamlike European city, along a boulevard teeming with living statues, a man is running from his past, a woman is consumed by grief, shoes lead their wearers astray, and all must learn what it means to travel along the ray of the star.
The Impossibly
978-1-56689-281-0
When the anonymous narrator botches an assignment from the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life becomes a participant in his punishment. His final assignment: to seek and identify his own assassin.
The Exquisite
978-1-56689-187-5
Henry, left destitute by circumstance and obsession, is plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy outfit that stages the murders of anxiety-ridden clients seeking to experience—and live through—their own carefully executed assassinations.
Indiana, Indiana
978-1-56689-144-8
As a young man, Noah fell deeply in love with Opal, a young woman with a penchant for flames. On a dark winter night, he will sift through his memories, trying to make sense of a lifetime of psychic visions and his family’s tumultuous history.