by Tim Bowling
Uncannily, the photographer picked up the train of Greaver’s thoughts.
“You canna expect others to understand, doctor. When you work with the dead, in such a place as this, you might be accepted, but not loved.” He leaned back, made a square over one eye with two fingers of each hand. “The army survives on intrigue. They might even be in the business of making it happen. Never mind. I was wondering, doctor, if you’d mind posing for a photographic study?”
Greaver brightened, Already, the pounding of the horse hooves had faded. He unlooped his glasses and puffed on the lenses. Wouldn’t Tomkins be impressed! A carte de visite, in the field, preserving a corpse! It was a surprising and marvellous world, full of opportunity, once the shadows sped away from your feet and you could listen to the lovely flow of liquid through a syringe, hour after hour. After wiping his lenses clean, Greaver looped them over his ears, and the world dazzled, all of it zinc-lined, at his service.
He licked his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, gracefully cleared his throat. “Perhaps, sir, we could come to some sort of a bargain.”
The photographer held his grin still for several seconds. Then he laughed so loud that Greaver was certain the dead still out in the fields all sat up to enjoy a final earthly joke.
VI
September 21, near Sharpsburg, Maryland
Three days after his fight with Orlett, when the worst of the shock had worn off, when he was able to blot out the images of the blood-coloured fringe of hair around the overseer’s leering face and drown the desperate lie flung from that foul mouth, John returned to himself. He lay in a square, sagging tent crowded with groaning, gasping men on their way to death, judging by the stench of it that pressed against his eyes and lips, a stench as bad as what he remembered hogs giving off as they squealed before the knife.
At first, he could not tell where he was or who the dying men were, but by lying still and listening, he soon understood his situation. The accents and uniforms told him he lay among wounded soldiers of the South, and he assumed that he was still near home, where the great battle had been fought and where the overseer, Orlett, had died. But the why of his situation remained a mystery. He was neither a Rebel soldier nor even wounded. He lay motionless in the ceaseless fly drone and watched the grimy canvas over him brighten and darken with the hours.
That gradual change—and the play of shadow as the kind-faced, sad-eyed man moved among the groaning forms, dispensing whisky and pills and soft words—took him further back, to the beginning of his memories. Outside Daney and Caleb’s shack, that huge pile of sawdust, soft, with some wood chips in it, layered in it like the feathers in a goose. A pile he had to tilt his head back to see the top of. In the rain, watching that pile turn from yellow to almost blood red. Then, holding some sawdust in his hand taken from inside the pile. Its paleness like his own. He’d stare at the dust in his hand, trying to capture exactly when the colour changed. But the blood red just happened, as if he’d closed his eyes. The sawdust would be heavier, just a little, like rape seed. He’d stick his hand back into the pile, plunge it deep to where the dust was still yellow and dry and light. If it rained hard enough and long enough, the whole pile changed and he’d sit beside it, drenched, breathing in the sweet, wood-scented air, blinking up to catch the flight of a trilling oriole—its song behind his eyes—but he couldn’t hold it like the dust. He couldn’t feel it that same way. Only the dust . . . the colours changing . . . the weight . . . his hand plunging deeper, till it came out like Caleb and Daney’s, darker than any blood, even the hog’s blood in the barn, but spreading over him like that hog’s blood, like the light over the fields . . .
Now a shadow passed, hovered. A broad hand, slightly damp, lowered to his forehead, a kind voice asked if he’d like some water. He closed his eyes, and it was Daney instead, her smell—of sweat and earth, the moist wool of the shift she’d made for herself, and the tang of okra.
• • •
She sat on a plain bench in the dirt-floored, rough-lumbered shack with mud stuck in the chinks of the walls, shelling peas into a tin pan and laughing at Lute, the yellow hound at her feet, sighing and whining in his sleep, sometimes waking enough to snap at the flies circling in the syrup-thick air. Daney’s laugh was deep and rich—the way a river would laugh if it could, Caleb always said. Daney laughed more than the other slaves, but it wasn’t always an easy laugh. John hadn’t known when he first understood the difference, when he had learned that a laugh could be a weapon too. Daney always said she could bear anything so long as her children were not taken from her. And she never used her laugh as a weapon inside the family. Not once. She was a stout, strong, yellow-skinned woman with a wide gap between her front teeth. Her hands were quick, small skillets of melted butter. Her bosom was large and soft from many years of nursing, and she had a way of turning and looking over her shoulder just exactly when you didn’t want her to see what you were doing. Caleb adored her. He said, “You g’wan, you talk to Daney, she knows,” more than he said anything else. But Caleb didn’t say much. He was starless black and tall, and the bones showed sharp in his long face. He liked nothing better than to take the young children on his knee and sing them songs about grasslands and lions that had been sung to him by his grandfather.
John did not stay with Daney and Caleb in their shack in the slave quarters a half-mile down the dirt road to the fields. He did once, but that was a long time ago, when he could sit by the sawdust pile and watch it change. For years he had stayed at the big house in a neat, pine-scented room off the kitchens and had done the tasks of a house servant, but he worked hard in the fields and barn too when needed. Some said the master kept him at the house exactly because he was so light-skinned, they said the master felt embarrassed having such a bright nigger living with the darkies; it might seem to the other white folks that he didn’t know and respect the difference. Once Jabeth the freedman snickered out of his wrinkled, peanut-shaped face and said that maybe the master’s embarrassment meant a lot more than skin colour. But Daney had shut him up fast. She had laid her sewing by and crossed her bare forearms and said that she’d been on this farm a long time and there was no goings-on she didn’t know about. Later, she told John that he’d been bought and brought to the farm from Baltimore when he was but a baby and nobody knew who his father and mother were. Later still, when he was old enough, she told him that his parents were probably sold at auction the same time he was, and probably into the South to work on a cotton or tobacco plantation. It did no good to think about it, but it was important to know the truth so you wouldn’t get any wrong ideas about what being a slave really meant. She said, it doesn’t matter how easy your life might be now, but when you’re a slave you’d better know change will come, and most times it’s hard. But it was no good thinking on it too much. Weren’t she and Caleb always so good to him and the master as kind as could be expected? He ought to be grateful that he hadn’t been sold into the South too. He should thank the Lord every day that his lot was as good as a slave’s could be. Even when he was hired out at times, and only ever a few miles away—to Sharpsburg or Shepherdstown—didn’t the master choose good situations where a slave could learn woodcraft and tinsmithing and other useful skills? Yes, Daney insisted, he ought to be grateful that things weren’t a lot worse.
By then, by the winter of 1859, John was sixteen and not a boy anymore, and he could listen to the talk of the white folks and the blacks too and know that nothing caused more excitement than the possibility of a war breaking out. Sometimes it was all anyone talked about. John understood that it made the white folks angry and nervous; they mostly didn’t see how any good could come of it. The master sometimes asked him after such long and heated talks if he wasn’t happy with his lot, if Daney and Caleb and the others weren’t happy too. Didn’t he treat them well? Hadn’t he always done so? They wouldn’t have any reason to run off, would they? As time went on, the master asked such questions more often, and he grew increasingly agitated, his vo
ice almost pleading, his eyes wet. His skin looked like a china doll’s with cracks. And the tracks were always glazed with tears, the thin lips always trembling, the sparse white hairs on the tiny, bony chin a sign that the master wasn’t looking after himself proper anymore.
For his part, John did not know what to think about a war. When he listened to Daney and some of the other blacks, he could feel their excitement and hope for freedom inside himself, a kind of warmth, as of a change from winter to spring. Daney said that a war would change everything for the better, that it would lead to the promised land. And she laughed more. All the black folks were happier, even after a new overseer was hired and punishments for misdeeds, such as not working hard enough or fast enough, were increased. Some of the free blacks in the area, though, were sullen. Jabeth said that if he’d known freedom was coming he would have just waited and not spent his hard-earned wages on something that he was going to get anyhow. But Caleb didn’t like the talk or even Daney’s laughs. He said there was nothing that important that ever came easy, and if those fool niggers thought the white folks was just going to fold their hands and bow as the black folks packed their belongings and walked away, well, he wasn’t that much of a fool. And besides, where was there to go? Daney said he was just getting old and tired and it was a good thing she had enough life in her for both of them when the time came, as it surely would. Caleb never argued about that. If Daney said a thing would happen, he didn’t question it.
But when John stood before the master, or when he walked slowly among the visiting farmers with a serving tray in his hands and listened to them argue that a war fought over slavery would be a foolish waste of money and lives, a desire for peace and stability rose up in him even as his circumstances remained largely unchanged.
But even with life going on much as always, the outbreak of war had seemed closer every day. As the newspapers heated up with opinions (Jabeth always relayed what he read) and gossip among whites and blacks reached a fever pitch, the master about lost his senses. He became convinced that the blacks were plotting to rise up and take over. For the first time, he let the new overseer, Orlett, take full charge of discipline on the farm. Food was held back: meat was rarely given and each black received only a peck of corn a week and had to grind it into meal by hand. But Caleb was skilled at trapping animals in the woods and good at teaching those skills too. So the families didn’t suffer overmuch from want. John knew they felt the change, though. Mostly they feared what could happen and not what was happening. Even though Daney never doubted that freedom was coming, she knew how right Caleb was about white folks. And the master’s behaviour troubled her. She said, just lie low and don’t give any cause for trouble, our time’s coming and all we has to do is bide it and wait.
So John worked harder in the house and especially in the fields on those rare occasions when the master sent him there. Because he did not like the way the new overseer studied him. His eyes had a hawk’s hunger and patience and he licked his thick, red lips as if waiting for a chance to uncoil the black snake whip from around his shoulders. So John never let up, never talked back. Besides, he knew he was strong and growing stronger and he loved to drive the oxen and cut wood and gather in the harvest and help with the corn shucking. And he enjoyed being with the field hands, for he rarely spent time in the slave quarters, preferring to stay around the big house and listen and watch.
One night the master had several guests over and they got to talking about their favourite subject: what to do with the niggers now that war seemed sure to come. Enoch Brand from over near Hagerstown laughed out of his ruddy face with its lips flapping like a horse’s and told the master that if he wanted to get anything at all for his property he’d better sell it quick while he still had a chance; otherwise, his property would just walk off on him, it had happened already, he’d heard tell of a plantation in Calvert County where the niggers set fire to all the buildings before they left. Oliver Kendrick, who farmed up near the north woods, scoffed and said, just let them try, they know they won’t get very far here. And the master trembled like a soaked hound and said he wasn’t so sure about that, hadn’t his slaves been getting more difficult, every month, one woman he’d owned for years seemed to laugh at him all the time even though her face showed nothing. That’s how it starts, Enoch Brand said, they get to thinking they have a right to be free and they might just as well be free, you might just as well count your losses right then and there.
After the guests had gone, the master called him into the dining room. The room always impressed John, no matter how often he entered it. The gleaming warmth of the long walnut table and scrollwork-backed chairs and of the tall liquor cabinet calmed him even as the fancy oak and glass chandelier took his breath away.
The master sat at the table, his left hand holding a tall wineglass, one finger of his right hand tracing the glass’s rim.
“John, I want you to tell me everything that’s being said in the slave quarters.”
To John’s surprise, the master’s voice shook more than usual, like his right hand, and his pale face seemed as fragile as the china plates stacked on the sideboard just beyond him.
“Especially what Daney and Caleb say. They’re up to something, I know it.”
Upset, John looked away, up to the chandelier. But all the little hanging glass lights trembled as if they were tears that belonged on the master’s face, and so John felt no protection from the sudden surge of anger that he tried in vain to hide. The thought of spying on Daney and Caleb was as unthinkable as it was unnecessary.
The master tightened his grip on the wineglass. His trembling jaw suddenly set, his blue eyes lost their watery blue and narrowed.
“If I do not get the truth, I’ll let Mr. Orlett do what he will. Do you understand?”
John nodded, swallowed dryly, and retreated slowly at a wave from the master’s right hand.
In the hallway, he stood a moment before the full-length wall mirror, studying his own face as if he could read what he should do there. But, as always, he found only his own confusion, his pale skin like the master’s, and the slight bulge to his eyes and the thickness of his bottom lip that he understood made him a servant. Daney and Caleb, he knew, were plotting nothing, and, as it turned out, after weeks spent around their shack and others, John discovered no news to report. The master grew increasingly agitated, he took more and more to drinking wine until his cheeks wore a constant stain, like the bruises in a windfall apple. Something was bound to happen. John knew it. Everybody seemed to know it.
The week before Christmas, cold but no snow. The hog-killing time. One morning the master called all the blacks together in the barnyard—Caleb and Daney and their six children and the five other families, about thirty folks in all, little children to the very old. John watched the breath flow from every mouth. The blacks shivered and wrapped their bare arms around their shoulders. Letta’s small child cried and she hushed it fast. Nobody else said a word. The smell of hogs’ blood thickened the air.
The master came out with the overseer, a short, stocky man with a large cleft in his chin and always a red ruff of whiskers framing his face like a half-circle of caked blood and a sparse clutch of hairs at his Adam’s apple. His cheeks showed white and patchy-red in the cold, like slices of bloody ham. He tapped a rawhide whip lightly against his thigh and kept grinning the way a dog does when it’s running. At every word the master spoke, the overseer twitched like a giant muscle.
The reason for the gathering was made plain enough. The master stood with one gloved hand on his hip, the other gloved hand holding a cane, and scanned the crowd of blacks slowly. But when he spoke, his eyes were raised, as if seeking an answer from the pink-streaked sky.
“A hog’s been stolen. And if it’s not returned by sundown, if the thief doesn’t confess to the crime, you’ll all be punished.” The master lowered his eyes. He dabbed at the corners of them with a white handkerchief before continuing. “I know I’ve always been too easy on you, to
o fair. It was your late mistress’s desire, and I’ve honoured it. But when you take advantage . . .” He paused to catch his breath, leaning on his tall cane with the bronze knob shaped like a horse’s head. His breathing was still audible, but he managed to control it. “Even so, if the thief confesses, I’ll see to it that you don’t all suffer for the crime.” He turned to the overseer and nodded.
The overseer pointed with his bullwhip in the direction of the shacks, and the downcast blacks, almost as one, turned to leave.
“John,” the master said after the other blacks had gone, “I want you to find out.” His old face was sickly, the cheeks sagging and bright red, his nose and eyes running. “I’m warning you too, if I don’t have that thief by sundown, I will recover my loss.” He paused, his gloved right hand trembled as he slowly raised it. Beside him, the overseer’s breath flowed like a panting dog’s. “If I have to, I’ll sell Jancey. I’ll have Orlett take her into the city tomorrow.”
John’s heart constricted. Then a rush of hot anger almost made him shout. But he swallowed the sound and stared at the overseer without blinking. Now it had come as Caleb predicted, and he knew there was no other choice. He hung his head and confessed that he’d taken the hog.
The overseer kept right on grinning and tapping his thigh with the whip. But the master spoke kindly.
“That’s not true, John. I know it isn’t. I didn’t realize that she meant anything to you. But it can’t be helped. I admit, she’s a handsome girl, but that’s why she’ll bring a good price at auction. I don’t wish to sell her, you understand. I have always looked after my people. But I will not be made a fool of in my own home, I will not be laughed at.”
John insisted it was true, that he had been hungry and wanted meat. He tried to describe the theft but it was no use; he had no wiles for lying.