The doctor glided his fingers over her belly. “Perfect condition,” he said. “I’ve seen many pregnancies, but you . . . no stretch lines, no discoloration, no absurd weight gain. Beautiful.” He palmed her belly, held it with both hands. “I’ll tell you what, Miss Katherine. Your husband is a lucky man.”
“He’s dead,” she said.
Richard coughed.
“The letter came yesterday.”
“Why, Katherine, you didn’t tell me Billy died,” Richard said.
“I asked Annie to give me a day or two before I let the family know.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Doctor said. His words triggered a flow of imagined grief in Katherine and she cried . . . no, wailed . . . like she’d lost the baby. Lost many babies.
“He was a good man, my Billy!” she said. “A soldier. Now, my baby’ll be a bastard.” She grabbed hold of Doctor and hung on ’im, cried beyond help. “No man’ll have me now.”
Doctor held Kathy the way doctors don’t. “It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t want to upset the baby.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to upset the baby,” Richard said, mad. It didn’t stop her.
“A pretty girl like you?” Doctor said. “You’ll find a husband in no time at all.”
“But so many good men are dead,” she cried. “Like my Billy. What if they’re all dead? But not you, Doctor. You’re so kind. If only I could find a new husband like you. Then my baby and I would truly be blessed by God.”
“Doctor?” Richard said. “Why don’t you come back next week. Give Katherine some time to recover . . . from this loss.”
“I reckon I should come back tomorrow,” Doctor said and he took Kathy’s hand, already a fool. “This baby is due any day now. I can keep a close eye on her and the baby.”
“This is all such bitter news for us all,” Richard said, somberly. “I assure you, Doctor. Annie and I will take good care of her. We’ll call on you if we need you before then.”
“As her doctor, I insist that I . . .”
“Doctor,” Richard said, final. “That’ll be all.”
Doctor hung in the space for a moment and held tight Kathy’s hand. “Thank you, Doctor,” Kathy said, pitiful, before Doctor gathered his tools and went.
When the door closed, Richard rushed over to Kathy and said in an angry whisper, “What the hell was that?”
“My baby will have a father,” she said.
“What do you want me to do, Katherine? Divorce her? I will. You just say it and I’ll have her out of this house that minute. It can be just you and me and our baby—the nest you want.”
“That’s not what I want,” Kathy said.
“Then tell me what it is so I can give it to you.”
“Why should I have to tell you? Why do I always have to tell you everything?”
“Not everything. Just tell me you love me,” Richard said. “Tell me you only want me. That you want to marry me so I’m sure.”
“You already know I do.”
“Then how am I going to marry you if you don’t want me to divorce her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He threw his hands up. “I swear I don’t understand you sometimes.”
“She ain’t all bad like you made her out to be, Richard. She has this whole place to run. If I’m fair, I’m the one that took her husband, has his bastard baby, and she’s been nothing but kind to me.”
“You’re simple, Katherine. You think everybody’s got the best intentions, but she’s a cold bitch.”
“Maybe so. But I don’t want to take this house from her. Live in this town. I don’t want people pointing and accusing me of being the whore that stole you from your wife. Divorced or not, I can’t get my good ending that way. Not here.” Her real tears come. “I want to go somewhere where we can build our own memories. Raise our family together.” She took his hand and laid it flat on her belly. He hesitated, almost pulled away, before he gave into it, ran his hand smoothly and gently over her.
“We’ll need money,” Richard said. “I’ll sell everything. Anything that ain’t tacked down. I promise I’ll give you the life you’ve always wanted. A place for our family.”
“When?” Kathy said. “And don’t tell me after the war ends, ’cause that’s never gonna end.”
He swiped his hands down his clothes and hobbled to the door with purpose.
“Where you going?” Kathy said.
Without a word, he ambled down the stairs and to the outside porch where Annie was sitting alone. The last guest had gone. He stood over her and said those final words: “I’m divorcing you!”
29 / JANUARY 1865
Tallassee, Alabama
GENERAL SHERMAN AND his Union Army—Lincoln’s army—left behind a three-hundred-mile path of destruction, sixty miles wide, all the way from Atlanta to Savannah, the reports say. So Lincoln offered him Savannah as a Christmas present. Our freedom’s coming. But right now, people are hungry, searching for work and food. Whites and runaways. And there’s none—out of spite or shortage—and the reasons don’t matter when you’re desperate.
Almost everybody but us has moved on. Annie lets her hands take what they need from the fields, and leaves beef and pork for Charles and the twelve others still here. And me. I wouldn’t miss this.
JOSEY OPENS THE front door and steps on the sun-wet porch, barefooted, and breathes in the smoke of burning pine and bacon. Her flimsy white dress wind-presses against her body—the winds change—but her sour expression tells me she cain’t feel it.
Her pale skin is drained silver from sickness but not flu. She closes the door behind her and her pupils shrink to pinpricks from morning sun. A fly shuffles the thin blonde hairs on her arm as it staggers over strands, seeking a tangled yellow crumb of cornbread there. She rubs her arms with her bulby fingertips. Her nails are chewed down to the quick, swollen dark pink. A purple color traces the nail beds. She flicks her blanket, scattering crumbs caught in it, and they spread like chicken feed.
I’ll call her name sometimes.
I’ll hover out in front of her and watch her watch me the way a blind man watches someone, not seeing, but seeming so. This time, she looks through me, out toward the trees where those changing winds are bending the world. Naked-bare branches stretch to the left in some dancer’s pose, and brown grasses reach upward from beneath the snow. She folds her blanket and goes back inside leaving me on her steps alone even though it felt like we was talking.
Josey asked Charles about me once.
Maybe more than once, but that one time, Charles’s answer caused me to think Josey was asking about me, and not Annie. It’s not strange for a negro to lose parents and for folks to move on in silence. And that day she asked about me, Charles had come home late from working hard. It was almost midnight when she woke him—a six-year-old rousing a giant of a man. But it was her that made him uneasy when she said, “What happened to my momma?”
She hugged her doll baby to her chest and stood doe-eyed, waiting. Charles told Josey that she needed to go back to bed and he’d tuck her in if she wanted. But she kept waiting and he was tired, hemming and hawing, then a rest came over him when she asked again. He said, “Your momma was beautiful,” he said. “Free,” he said. “Free because she decided so. Because she kept some sliver of hope guarded inside her mind.
“She had courage.
“And when she died, she left that courage inside of you.
“So beautiful a young woman, she was, that she glowed from the inside,” he said.
I felt flush as I listened. Embarrassed that anyone would have those things to say about me. So I decided, no, Charles must have been telling Josey about Annie.
Inside, a fire roars from Charles’s oven keeping the chill a step away. When Josey comes inside, the flames sway. A kettle boils on top of the stove while a wood bucket of warm water steams from the floor just outside the pocket of warm. Charles puts a tall metal rod in the bucket and stirs. The drowned garmen
ts wrap around his pole, layer after weighted layer. He lifts the mound and dumps it back in.
Josey sits at the table in front of a bowl of stew that Charles left her. Her parted blonde hair hangs over most of her face and she swoops it behind her ears neatly.
He’s been keeping sharp things away from her. Because sometimes, she cuts. And sometimes, she lies about it. Because sometimes, things can happen that are so hard to understand, so violent in nature, that the mind abandons the body and not all of it comes back right.
It’s what happened to Momma, too.
Charles keeps socks on her hands at night now in case her nails grow and make her dangerous to herself. Everything with jagged edges is a threat. It’s what made her sickness real to Charles.
She spoons a mouthful of stew while Charles churns the clothes in the bucket, his pole knocking on the wood bottom. He lowers hisself to the floor next to the bucket and picks out a shirt. He wrings it mostly dry and does the same with the next piece and the next ’til his water bucket’s empty. He puts the pieces in a wicker basket for Josey to hang.
When she finishes her food, she takes his damp things and joins the wind outside. It gusts in patterns of circles and crosses, blowing her stink off—onion and garlic of stew. Josey hangs clothes on the line to dry, hand-straightening them as she goes. The button-down white shirt that Charles wore for what was supposed to be Freedom Day still has a stain on it.
Josey reaches down for his trousers, her britches, and a dress when giggles of children and the sounds of running-away feet blow by me. Not real.
I hear Josey’s thoughts sometimes. They’re like her prayers spoken that I cain’t answer. I’m not God. But I hear her just the same and I don’t know why. Not just hers.
But those noises of running children ain’t real. The voices, neither. They’re only troubling thoughts. Thoughts like visions that come and go. Not real. Like this fog that she keeps seeing roll in, over the property. Not real.
The real and not real blend together for her like it’s doing right now.
The sunshine. That’s real. The melting snow. Real. These clothes. Real. That fog near the woods and that black shadowy figure sprinting across the yard. Not real.
Josey reaches down to grab her wet stocking from her bucket.
The bucket’s gone.
Our clothes sway on the line to the rhythm of children’s pitter-patter. Real. Not real.
The fog near the wood’s a blanket. Not real.
A child walks out from the woods, between the trees, surrounded by a gray cloud of fog. She’s just a girl. Eight or nine. She waves to Josey, then skips alongside the trees, got a brand-new rolling hoop around her neck. Not real.
The wind blows the hanging clothes and whips Charles’s trousers into a split. Real. They flare and behind ’em is Ada Mae . . . when she was just nine years old. She stands alongside the rest of the trash gang. None of ’em are a day older than seven. They take off running, zigzagging, toward a start line finger-drawn in the dirt. They ready to race. They’re holding handmade hoops—long broken branches with the leaves wiped off, bent backward and fastened in a circle, end to end.
I don’t stop Josey from running over to join ’em. Our hoop is as nice as Ada Mae’s was new. We stand on the start line a foot taller and years older than everybody else. We cain’t lose.
Ada Mae teeters on her tiptoes alongside us with a white rag in her clutches. Her arm falls. “Go!” she yells. And Josey takes off, beating the top of her hoop with a stick, moving in front of the others. Ada Mae crosses my path to the finish line, waving us on. Josey’s gon’ win! Josey’s gon’ win!
A big-busted and big-boned girl runs up next to Josey, six foot tall and feral-looking. A challenger. But we move faster, more nimble, ’til that dusty girl curves around us and makes Josey lose her hoop and her balance. Josey slams into the girl and they both tumble over. Josey leaps up, grabs her hoop, and gets us ready to start again but the girl pushes Josey to the ground. “Don’t hold me!” Josey say. “If you don’t let go, we both gon’ lose.”
The other racers are on their way, not slowing down.
“Let me go!” Josey say, kicking the girl.
By the time she breaks free, the racers are passing us. Ada Mae is at the finish line, waving her white rag, but she’s beginning to fade away. All the racers do. Our hoops do, too. Only Charles’s trousers are billowing. Those, and the feral girl’s.
She throws Josey to the ground and puts her hand on Josey’s mouth. “I ain’t gon’ hurt you. Don’t scream.” Her words trigger Josey’s memory of George sitting on top of her, strangling her, seething through clinched teeth. “You scream,” he say. “I’ll kill you!”
Another girl, a woman, runs out of the woods. Real.
She say to Feral, “You get the clothes. I’ll hold this one down,” and straddles Josey now.
Josey screams, “Da—!” But the woman slaps her hand over Josey’s mouth. Her broken yellow fingernails are murky like grease-soaked paper.
“Stop moving, girl,” the woman say. “We just need warm clothes.”
“Mama!” Feral say. “I got ’em!”
Josey watches the shadow of a tree roll across the ground and touch her shoulder, her neck, all over her stomach. Her eyes widen and her body seizes, helpless from the memories of these trees that once held her prisoner.
“Come on, Mama!” Feral say, running away from our clothesline. She got Charles’s shirt and all of Josey’s clothes, except one dress. They disappear into the silence of Tallassee.
Scattering noises revive.
They’re loud like a flock of nesting birds awakened. It’s coming toward us. A space between the trees sweeps open. A gray Confederate uniform. A black man. Under one arm is a pile of her clothes. Jackson throws his bag from his back and lifts Josey over his shoulder, pushes forward to the house.
30 / FLASH
Conyers, Georgia, 1847
TWO WEEKS AND I haven’t told Jeremy that I forgive him yet ’cause when you love the way we love, been through what we been through, you ain’t got to say it. Staying is enough.
EVERY DAY SINCE that day with Mr. Shepard, I been waiting for him to come back to work. It’s almost noon and he ain’t been here today, either. I scooch back on his piano stool, slide open the cover, and fall on a key. It tings.
I press another lightly.
Ting.
I start playing the only song I know. The same song I learned from watching him play. He up to four songs now but his music never gets old. But my song don’t sound like his.
That man with the satchel came by yesterday at sunrise. A Freedom Fighter. The one Albert told me was gon’ come and escape us from here. He came a week late. When he rattled the door, I was hung over my broom sulking. The noise made me jump ’cause don’t nobody come ’round that early. Almost 8:00 a.m. And we don’t open ’til two on Mondays and Tuesdays. So when he knocked, I didn’t answer.
I started sweeping my broom toward the door instead, leaned into the crack of it to peek at him. He must have heard me ’cause he took a step back, arms held up, a leather satchel in his hand, and let me look. He was a white man, plain as any but honest-looking—not like those around here. He had a boy’s face on a man’s body, the only giveaway to his age was the thin creases in his wide forehead. His blonde hair was groomed but not too much to mistake him for not-a-hardworker. Just cut nice, is all.
His brown leather vest laid over his blue-buttoned shirt and above his trousers the round of his silver belt buckle shined.
He said, “I’m looking to hire out a blacksmith and a nurse for the day.” He went on about needing help for his young son, needing horseshoes. “Soon as possible,” he said.
His satchel had an orange stripe across the flap where Albert said it’d be and he shifted it from one hand to the other as he talked, casual-like, made sure I saw it.
He pointed to the wagon behind him where two dark negroes was already in the seats, ones I ain’t never seen ar
ound here before. Twelve or thirteen was the girl, and the boy was nine or so.
He asked if he could at least see who he was talking to so I cracked the door open and let him see a piece of me. He nodded. I remembered what Albert said, “Nobody’ll suspect us if we travel this way. Not only are we traveling in the daylight, we’re going the wrong way. Hired-out day laborers, we are. Fancy word for borrowed slaves. And by the time Cynthia realize we wasn’t coming back, we’d be long gone and too far away for her to care. Maybe she wouldn’t care, no way. She don’t own us. But that fact don’t keep some folks from acting like it.”
“You do nursing?” the satchel man asked and shifted his bag again. “Is there somebody I can talk to about hiring you out? A blackmith, too. I heard y’all had a blacksmith.”
I looked beyond the man to out near his wagon. Albert weren’t on it. He was standing out in the field across the road near his workshop. I suspect he was waiting for me to decide. He’d never push me the way my sister Hazel did that night she told me to run, and this satchel man was my chance to make her sacrifice worth something, make James’s and Momma’s killings meaningful. Make it so I belong to myself and my future.
But I already got freedom here. With Jeremy. He’s my future.
I can still smell him all around this room. On these piano keys, my fingertips. My face. His scent reminds me of how our love lingers.
Satchel Man said again, “Somebody here I can talk to?”
I didn’t answer.
Don’t need his help.
Freedom is where the heart is and I got the man who loves me. Whoever heard of running anytime beside night, anyway? And what am I supposed to make of him coming to the front door like this? Got negroes in the wagon. Reckless.
I closed the cracked-open door ’til there was just a line of light between us. I pushed my lips to the space and said, “We ain’t open.”
EVEN THOUGH THIS is the longest time me and Jeremy ever been apart, longest we been without lovemaking, I know he’ll be back for me. I shouldn’t have made him mad, said what I said. But I was mad, too, at what happened with Mr. Shepard. It stayed fresh in my mind. Dirty.
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