by Wayne Grady
A few years before Moody and Annie came to Louisiana, a slave revolt on a sugar plantation in St. John Parish, a few leagues up from New Orleans, had been brutally suppressed by federal troops: a hundred negroes slaughtered, their heads stuck on poles along the highway from the Andry estate to New Orleans. The rebels had refused to cut cane, which was the Devil’s own crop. Moody had considered raising it when they’d first moved to the Rio Brazos, but because of that rebellion had decided cane was too hard on a body. Annie told him cane was not as hard as rice: his father had converted part of his land from Sea Island cotton to rice when Eli Whitney’s cotton gin flooded the market with upland cotton. With the fields in rice, slave conditions on his father’s plantation declined considerably; the slaves referred to Plantagenet as Plant-à-genou, and there was grumbling and talk of insurrection, which his father and Casgrain put down with a ruthlessness that had appalled him. It was as if he were being raised in a slaughterhouse, a nightmare in which everyone fought everyone else to the death. So why had Annie wanted to stay there? By the time she’d come along, the fiercest of the negroes had been made drivers, armed with cudgels and lashes and given carte blanche to wield them against troublemakers as they saw fit, and Annie was surely a troublemaker.
After Lucas was born he’d thought maybe it had had something to do with that. Who was Lucas’s father? Lucas was lighter skinned than Annie, but surely if it was Casgrain, she wouldn’t have wanted to keep Lucas close to him. Would she?
6.
They ate their biscuits in silence, as though they were Communion wafers and therefore signified a kind of failure, and then they got down off the porch to haul river water up to the cotton. But though it was late in the day, it was still too hot to water. Every bucketful they poured on the ground rolled into the hollows between the plants like quicksilver on parchment. They’d have to get up early and water when the earth was still soft with dew. They stacked the buckets on the wagon and went back to the porch and sat watching ants carrying biscuit crumbs off the table. Neither of them felt talkative. They fanned themselves, drank some water, listened to the crickets and admired the way the leaves on the cotton plants shimmered in the sunlight and the light breeze. Upland cotton came from Mexico, and could stand the heat. Annie went inside and brought out some beans to shuck. Beans were also from Mexico, one of the Three Sisters. The other two were Corn and Squash. But there was a fourth family member: Brother Death.
“What do you think, Annie?” he said, nodding toward the cotton. “Ton an acre? Millican got a ton last year.”
Annie shook her head and went on with her shucking. He looked back at the cotton, calculating. Mentioning Millican had been a mistake. He would have withdrawn the remark if he thought she was listening. Millican’s farm was upriver from theirs. It was bigger, more like a plantation, although not as much like one as Millican pretended it was. Millican had come out with the first wave of settlers brought to Texas by Stephen Austin, one of the Old Three Hundred, and he thought that earned him a place among the colony’s uncrowned aristocracy. Now Jared Groce’s place farther south, where Sam Houston had crossed the Rio Brazos in ’36, was a plantation. Groce had two hundred slaves; Millican had twenty-seven—twenty-eight now, he corrected himself, wincing. Groce had separate dwellings for field servants and another for the overseer; he also had an ice house, a dairy and a carpentry shop. Millican had his own house, with a cook and an upstairs maid who lived in. He’d no more get down off his porch to help a slave haul water than he would help one of his cows eat grass. He told Moody he shouldn’t, either. It was wrong to treat Annie and Lucas like they were human beings, it made everyone else’s slaves harder to keep down. The easier Moody was on his slaves, he’d said, the harder he had to be on his.
“Millican got a lot of things,” Annie said, not looking up from the beans.
He nodded, admitting his mistake. When he’d come back from the fighting, after being gone the better part of a year, the farm had been broke. Annie and Lucas had kept it going in his absence, at least they’d planted the corn, but Moody had decided it was too much to ask of them to manage cotton, too, so there’d been no cash crop last fall. He needed this year’s cotton, at least a ton an acre, and prices were down because of the war and President Polk. It wasn’t just the money. If he’d wanted money, he would have stayed in New Orleans and kept playing cards. But he needed some to keep the farm going. This was his home, his and Annie’s and Lucas’s. He stopped thinking about that, because he’d needed Lucas to keep the farm going, too, and Lucas was gone.
From the porch he could see the river, so silted up it looked like a field moving past the house. Not even a wet field. Before the war he had Lucas row out and set bottles on stumps floating by, and he’d shot at them for target practice. His old musket hadn’t been good for more than a hundred yards, but it had packed a good punch. His aim improved when the militia gave him a rifle. Three winters after their arrival on the Brazos, when Lucas was eleven, Moody had spent the better part of a month cutting through the riverbank so he could get a horse and wagon down to the water. That spring, the river had flooded so wide he couldn’t shoot crows across it anymore. The flood took his dock and he hadn’t rebuilt it, expecting the river to flood again, although it hadn’t.
Later that same summer the flood had brought him a barrel of brandy. He couldn’t imagine where it had come from, maybe some Mexican army camp upriver. Texas had still been part of Mexico then. He drank some of the brandy, quite a bit of it, actually, and considered keeping the rest. In New Orleans, brandy and cards and tobacco had been his three sisters, the part of his life that hadn’t been taken up with Annie and Lucas. He didn’t like a whiskey drunk. Whiskey made him hate the world and everything in it, including himself. A brandy drunk was mellower, even Annie noticed it, but she still stayed away from him when he’d had too much, and when the barrel showed up she told him he should take it into Boonville and sell it to the hotel owner. Before doing so, since it was a good idea, he’d decanted a couple of bottles and hidden them in the harness room for emergencies.
After the brandy had come the body of a Mexican officer, still in his compañia fusilero uniform: two white bandoleras crossed over a blue tunic. The body had snagged in a back current behind a tree root, and Moody had waded in and pulled it out. Eagles and eels had been at the eyes. His saber was gone, but his bayonet was still in its scabbard and Moody had kept it, and buried the officer in the side of the cut. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but the body drew flies and spooked the horses, and anyway, a man in uniform deserved a decent burial. In those days, before the big war, he still liked Mexicans. For him, fighting them hadn’t been an act of hatred but a contest of skills between equals, more like a card game. Killing that Mexican boy had been later, when the contest had shifted in favor of Polk’s army and Moody had been an involuntary volunteer. Annie had kept the Mexican’s boots, they were black and of good, thick leather. She broke them up when they were still wet and made a new seat for the rocker that still sat in the corner beside their bed, unused. She never had any more children after Lucas.
Thinking of the Mexican officer he’d buried in ’36 reminded him of the Mexican boy he’d killed in ’45. It was one of the ways he deduced the nonexistence of God—a decent God would have known he didn’t need reminding. Or else that God existed and was a mean-minded son of a bitch.
Annie stood up and carried the bowl of shucked beans into the house, leaving Moody on the porch to keep an eye on the cotton. Sea Island cotton hadn’t been too bad, but this Mexican upland cotton liked to grow in pure, dry sand, and people who grew it had to live where it lived, on barren sand in open sun. At least in New Orleans they’d had crawfish and okra, and the smell of the sea when the wind shifted to the south, and Annie had had island folk to talk to. She had taught Lucas some Gullah, and told him stories about Adanko the Rabbit and Aunt Nancy the Spider. Moody hadn’t asked her whether she wanted to leave New Orleans to come live in a desert where stinkbugs ate the
okra and Sister Cotton made them haul water from the river to keep her alive. It hadn’t occurred to him, but now he didn’t think it mattered; she would have said yes. She would have wanted to get Lucas out of New Orleans. She would have wanted to stay with him.
They’d have to pick the cotton soon, Moody thought, heat or no heat. There were just the two of them now with Lucas gone, so he would have to pick alongside Annie and work some to keep up with her. She was one of those determined women who would work until she dropped. The tireder she got, the faster she worked. But there wouldn’t be much to pick, three acres. Ten years and they still weren’t hardened to cotton. When they finished picking and ginning and baling they’d have to soak their hands in Dr. Ball’s Liniment and wrap them in muslin and still he’d barely be able to hold the reins when they drove the bales to Boonville. He often told himself he might rather ranch cattle than grow cotton, but there was something about the Brazos Bottom he liked. Before the fighting, once he got the cut dug and could get a wagon down to haul water, he and Lucas would stand in the river, passing buckets up to Annie to dump into the barrels, and the current would curl around his legs and he’d feel it trying to tug him deeper into the channel. There’d been women in New Orleans used to tug at him like that, before Annie. It wasn’t a feeling you gave in to easily, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, either.
“Come on out here and sit with me,” he called to her.
She brought out some sewing. She didn’t want to be with him. She sat breathing shallowly but he could see her dress move. She wasn’t dead inside. He watched for a while, hoping she would look up and meet his eyes, but she would not, and when he let his gaze drift over to the Mexican’s grave, like a tongue worrying a loose tooth, she sniffed. He should have pushed that dead body back into the river. He shouldn’t have taken the bayonet, either. He should get up off this porch now and throw the bayonet out as far into the river as he could. Instead, a listless kind of panic came over him, a feeling that there were things he would change but couldn’t do anything about. It was as though there were packages in his brain marked “Things to Worry About,” and when he opened one of them—say, Lucas gone—his brain automatically opened the next package, Annie not talking to him, and then the next, the Mexican boy, until his whole brain was a mess of worries. The heat, the crop, the low price for cotton, Millican. And then back to Lucas again.
Lucas had been a quiet boy, happiest sitting by himself with something in his hands. There’d been things in the New Orleans house that Lucas would stare at for hours: a tortoiseshell hairbrush that had belonged to Moody’s older brother, a pair of dice made from the knuckle bones of a pig, a wind-up brass pheasant that would strut across the dining table flapping its wings and squawking until it reached the edge of the table and fell into Lucas’s lap. Moody found the boy thoughtful, but Annie said he was just unhappy, and it was true that when the pheasant waddled off the table he didn’t laugh, he just gave it to Moody to rewind and put back on the table. Again, he would say. Again.
“I’ll be out at the barn if you need me,” Moody said, and when, as he expected, there was no pause in her sewing he got up and went to the harness room to look at the bone.
He kept it on a trestle table in the center of the room. It was a large femur, three and a half feet long, eighteen inches around at the middle, twenty-six and a half inches at each end. Annie hadn’t wanted him to keep it. It wasn’t part of any animal anyone had ever seen, and it frightened her. It frightened him. It had been in the harness room, coated in shellac and glowing like an ember in the pale light that came through the dust-coated window, since he found it when he was digging the cut. The dirt was red and friable when dry, easy shoveling. When his blade hit the bone he’d thought it was a rock, but there weren’t any rocks that big in Texas clay, and as it emerged from the hole he could see the shape of it, considered it for a long time, looked around as though worried that the animal that lost it might be coming back to claim it. Then the rain had started. He’d had to get the bone up to the barn before the clay by the river turned to gumbo. Moody had called Lucas to come down and help. Annie came, too, but when she saw the bone she backed away as though afraid it would jump up and bite her. Lucas was quietly inquisitive, as ever. He ran his hands over the bone like a blind man, asking a mess of questions. What was it? Where did it come from? How’d it get here? Annie didn’t ask anything.
“Mastodon,” Moody said, thinking that knowing what it was would make Annie feel better. “Animal like an elephant,” he said. “A leg bone, a femur.” He ran his finger down her thigh, from her hip to her knee, to show her where hers was.
“Leave it be,” she said, backing away.
“Why?” said Moody.
“Leave it be. My mam told me the Earth a man, and woman made from him, and elephant comed from woman. Elephant bones be left buried in the ground or trouble come.”
She was probably right, he’d thought, just about everything brought some kind of trouble, but it wasn’t like her to speak obeah and he hadn’t listened to her. He didn’t think she knew what an elephant was, let alone where they came from. Besides, this wasn’t an elephant.
“Mastodons aren’t elephants,” he’d said.
She’d gone up to the house, and he and Lucas had mud-wrestled the bone to the wagon bed and up to the barn.
“How’d you know what this is?” Lucas asked him.
“I read about bones like this when I was about your age,” Moody said. “And I saw some, in New Orleans.” The bones had had something to do with the explorers Lewis and Clarke, were being shipped to Washington for President Jefferson and had been displayed briefly in New Orleans. He remembered the smell of the tent, the wood chips on the ground, the red sand in the boxes that held the bones. He’d had to sneak in, because his father wouldn’t give him the penny.
“You learn about them in school?”
“Some,” Moody said. “And later, in college.”
“I want to go to school,” Lucas said.
“Where?” Moody asked, evasively. There weren’t any schools for blacks in Texas, or anywhere else that he knew of.
“Up North, they got schools I can go to.”
“We ain’t up North,” Moody had said, and Lucas had looked at the bone and kept quiet. “I can teach you what I know,” Moody said. “We can look for more bones up this river.”
But Lucas stayed quiet. It was the first time he’d asked Moody for something that Moody couldn’t give.
7.
When Moody came back from James Polk’s war, after the Mexican boy and the annexation of Texas, all he’d wanted was a long period of undisturbed calm, no bloated bodies rotting in the sun, no snipers in trees, no mortars shaking the ground. A rock could go back to just being a rock. Something flying through the air could be a bird. But almost the first thing Annie told him was that Lucas, who was eighteen and restless, had taken up with a woman belonging to Millican, of all people, a house servant named Benah. He’d been sneaking over to Millican’s at night and not coming back until near daybreak. Annie was worried frantic. She’d done everything to keep him back, but he wouldn’t listen, and she was glad to turn the job over to Moody. “He ain’t used to be afraid,” she said, as though treating Lucas as a human being had been a mistake, which is what Millican had been telling him all along. In New Orleans, he and Annie had lived together openly in the Quarter, let anyone think what they would. They’d had to be more careful in Texas, where every white farmer was a slaveholder and no one felt compelled by Mexican law to give up their slaves. Polk’s war might have been about territory, but Texans were fighting for slavery. Slavery was their religion; the Mexican War had been a religious war. But within their own house, Moody had gone on thinking of Annie as his wife and Lucas as their son.
Annie hadn’t been as comfortable with that as he was, he’d known that. The consequences for her were far greater than they were for him, even in New Orleans, but she’d gone along with it, wore her tignons and scarves and w
alked beside him as if her arm were in his, as if she were his fancy lady. At the very least, he’d thought, she and Lucas could be taken for his house servants, and a grand house it must be to have such well-dressed, fine-looking servants, must be a mansion, maybe she was more than a servant, look how yellow that boy is. And see how many tignons she was wearing. She was a fancy lady for sure. As long as they didn’t let it go to their heads, people turned a blind eye. Louisianais could detect differences of color in two glasses of milk; it didn’t bother them much but they noted it for possible future use. They didn’t think Annie was trying to fool anybody. They treated upper servants in a grand house like they were family, because in many cases they were. Until trouble come, as Annie would say. Then they turned on you like Sarah turned on Hagar, as if all the time they had had no idea.