I don’t want him to die.
I cain’t see his eyes good enough to tell if that’s what he wants to do.
Hazel used to say that you could tell when a person’s ready to go. There’s a stepping away from their own body that happens and you can see it in their eyes. She said people know when it’s time.
Like I know.
I know I’ll die by thirty-five because I’m not worthy of more than what Momma had.
I’ve been thinking about what Albert said. About the most valuable thing—time and health. Love being what we leave behind. Family, what we make it. Maybe when this baby comes, I’ll go with the Railroad. And maybe, if Albert’s well enough, the both of us, all three of us, could go together and be family. North, south. No matter.
I give him another sip of his water and he flinches ’cause the cup touched the wrong part of his lip. I cringe, too. He takes deep breaths to calm his pain.
“Here,” I say. “Drink some more whiskey.”
He pushes it away.
“Don’t you want to get better? Not get the infection?”
He tries to speak.
“Don’t talk. Just scrunch your eyes . . . blink once for no, twice for yes.” I look at him. “You understand?”
He blinks twice.
“Good. I need you to drink your whiskey. Just ’til you’re better, then you don’t have to drink it no more.”
He looks around his shop one-eyed. A line of gray puss is caught on his lashes joining the top and bottom together. He starts huffing and crying.
I say, “I been keeping it clean for you. I plan to do more sewing and hemming work from Cynthia and maybe when you’re healed, you can show me how to do what you do. Make pretty metal. Don’t matter I’m a girl.”
He blinks once, then shakes his head, a little, then forces words out even though he promised not to. “I don’t need no more of your help,” he say.
“Stop talking. You gon’ crack your face and get the infection.”
“You don’t owe me nothing,” he say, his words cracking the skin at his temples. Blood starts running down the side of his face.
Damn.
39 / 1870
Tallassee, Alabama
I BELIEVE IN REDEMPTION.
And Tallassee, Alabama, is redeeming herself, making the bad things that happened here better. Greening it over with her vines folded into walking paths, and climbing them up tall and wide things, erasing the brown of dirt and dead with the living. Full trees and bushes are crowding open skies, turning once-blue spaces to shade. Everything around her is coming back. Sagging limbs and leafs of many kinds—square and round, prickly and straight—are weighty on her branches like jewelry. Her mosses are furs. Tallassee is finding her way. Reclaiming her land. There’s no one to cut her to pieces or temper her spirit now. Five years since freedom, just over four since my grandbabies birth, and now benches and tools are swallowed by her rising tide. Fence posts and garden statues consumed. Redemption is taking place. It’s what happens to a plantation with no slaves. Where there were once fifty bodies and a hundred hands, there are now only four—two hands for Norah and two for Gwen. They’re sharecroppers who used to be slaves and still live on this plantation but get paid with crops and are free to leave.
It’s her time and Tallassee don’t owe nobody nothing.
I follow Josey through her, along a double-wide path worn by possums and prey. Possums, ’cause don’t nothing eat possums but people. Possums have nothing to fear ’til it’s too late.
Josey fast-walks beneath low-hanging branches that have grown back since Jackson’s ax last touched ’em. Their shade makes darkness here now. They’re only cut by white-tailed deer in winter while they’re shedding their antlers for summer horns. In the end, those horns’ll look like the unclenched hand bones of giants.
Josey keeps her head down, pushing forward past pine. She’s got paper stamps hanging out the side of her shoe that she’ll use at market to pay for food. The drought here has lasted too long.
She still got Charles’s three coins that he left her with before he went. She won’t spend it. She’s made her own money trading stamps for things she make with cotton—socks and under clothes. Cotton is everywhere and the cost is free.
A family of wild turkeys spur Josey’s children—almost five now—to get up the path faster, chasing stick legs as they windmill beneath puffy balls of feathers.
The children don’t look like twins.
They are as close looking as two strangers could be. Rachel’s milk-white skin and mousy blonde hair are Josey’s, but Squiggy’s browner like Jackson but with golden-brown eyes and his hair made of big loops of shiny copper.
And he’s slow-learning.
What Squiggy can do puts him about two years behind where he should be. Two years behind Rachel. She stood up to walk before one years old while Squiggy was still scooting at three.
He was just a month old when he started showing signs of his lag-behind. He wouldn’t move his head from one side to the other, or move his body the way Rachel would. And when Josey would lay him on the floor, his legs would splay open like a dead frog. Was mostly expressionless except for the two times he smiled. His limbs would just hang down when she held him. He wouldn’t lift a fist to rub a eye or a cheek, but Rachel would punch your neck from stretching.
He seemed lifeless, but he was breathing, and got so behind in the things Rachel could do easy. There was only one conclusion: “Will he look retarded?” Josey asked herself. Not because she didn’t love him but because she knew what he’d be up against.
THE FAMILY OF wild turkeys escaping the children get swallowed by the brush off the side of the road except for one lone turkey crossing behind Squiggy. Its face is featherless, bright red and puckered blue. A pouch of extra red skin hangs under its neck like a man’s saggy parts. Squiggy goes after it in a clumsy walk. Don’t know how to run yet. Then Rachel goes behind him, slower than she could because she wants to let him catch it and feel a victory. She and Josey have done most things for Squiggy all his life. They’re used to picking him up and walking for him and taking turns talking for him. Josey’ll chew his food to keep him from choking to death on a weak swallow. He always smiles on his own, though. And his good kisses are puckerless.
Josey passes the children up the path, then under an arch of tree branches and over grounded chicken feathers to meet the main road. Sunlight pours over the east field of the Graham plantation—Annie’s new farm store. The Market.
Her children fall behind and that’s good. It’s about time she let ’em go. They’ve already healed her. Some children are born to heal us. To heal the holes we thought were forever or heal the holes we didn’t know we had. Josey’s sickness ebbed because of Squiggy and Rachel. They needed her. Especially Squiggy. And Josey stopped cutting when she decided that his suffering was more important than hers.
When he was born, she didn’t lay him down on his own for months. She carried him in a sheet tied over her neck and it kept him taut against her body because she knew something was wrong with her baby. He was limp like I told you, and when she saw how his muscles were weak, she thought his heart might be weak, too. That maybe it would forget to beat. Maybe his lungs forget to breathe. She wanted him to feel her close, wanted him to mimic her body’s moves. Breathe like she breathed. Beat like she beat. And if God were to take him, he wasn’t gonna die alone like them babies who were laid down for a nap and let go.
“You crazy!” Sissy would tell her.
But some crazy is instinct.
Loud chatter and crowds drown Annie’s market. Rolling wagons leave welts in the grass. A group of children chase a dog under a wagon and through tents. Negro sharecroppers put food baskets on carts same as whites. Two buyers slouch next to a basket sorting collards and cucumbers, figs and something red.
Business is good for Annie. Like Tallassee, she’s growing back, too. Husbandless. Annie don’t say it, but her smile is proof. She rests atop her tan horse—
biggest around—watching from behind the sidelines, pleased with what she made, a market for anyone to buy or sell or give free to anyone who needs it.
Josey wanders through the market, unnoticed by Annie, touching onions and ripe okra. She stops at a brown bag of sugar. Her babies can’t eat that. But when they get here, sweets will be the first thing they beg for.
Bantam chickens outnumber the children here. There’re little hens and chickens running around the whole of this market and through the streets. Annie bought two—a boy and a girl—a while back and now fifty of ’em are running all over this place. All her neighbors including negroes got bantams now. Josey and Sissy don’t, though. Chickens too spooked to wander that way and into the darkness of unkept Tallassee. She’s wild.
I cross the main road and back through the gap to the footpath to find my two grandchildren, taking too long. Rachel and Squiggy are laughing as Squiggy pulls hisself out and over the gutter at the side of the road. Rachel’s behind him holding that turkey prisoner.
“Watch this,” she say, lowering it to the forest floor. “Yah!” she yells, and sets the turkey free. It runs right toward Squiggy. I swear it ran over his head and now they cain’t stop laughing. Squiggy claps his hands and say the only word he know—not, Momma—“Again!”
Behind me, an on-the-loose bantam stumbles straight in the road and gets runned over by a wagon. It gets up limping. Falls back down. Gets up again, fixed. I swear they live forever.
Three, four, five children are running after that wagon now. A man, half dressed in a soldier’s uniform, rides in it with a knapsack on his back—one like Jackson had when he first come home. All these years and soldiers’ bodies are still coming home. Not all of ’em dead. But no one asks anymore where these survivors have been. Only about the war.
“We don’t need your help,” Rachel say behind me.
“Just let me help him,” a man’s voice say.
Heat envelops me. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.
“No thank you, suh,” Rachel say.
I turn ’round to ’em. See what I’ve dreaded for five years. George’s face hits me like a madness. And I remember everything. I rush at him, get set ablaze passing through, nerves inside exposed and wild. I’ve wanted this. Burning alive. And I don’t care. Before he disappeared, I swore that no matter what Bessie said, I’d give my life for my daughter’s justice.
But I stop now.
Hesitate.
Children change everything.
Heartbreak.
My grandchildren.
I don’t make a move. Don’t want to leave this place.
George drags Squiggy by the arm out of the gutter and back onto the path. Squiggy’s knees scrape. “There,” George say. “All better now.”
“We fine, suh,” Rachel say. “We don’t want to bother you none.”
“It’s not a bother,” George say and bends through me to pick up Squiggy but Squiggy arches his back, knees George in his sack but George don’t feel that, neither. “Calm down, boy,” he say. “I’m just trying to lift you to the road.”
“He don’t like being helped,” Rachel say, forceful.
“Is that true, little man?”
“He don’t talk, neither,” Rachel say.
“He don’t need help, don’t talk . . . You either a true gentleman or the perfect woman.” He laughs and pulls his flask from his pocket and untwists it open.
He takes a swig, then wipes his mouth with his backhand. “Just water,” he tells Rachel, screwing the lid back on. “I’ve been off the poison almost six years now. Then last week . . . a small backstep. You ever sneak a little drink?”
Rachel don’t say nothing.
“Good girl,” he say. “Type of thing can put a man in his grave. How old are you?”
“Be five my next birthday.”
“Five years old! Whew! An old soul. Well beyond your years.”
“Come on, Squiggy,” Rachel say. “Momma’s waitin for us.”
“Squiggy? That’s a strange name for a boy. I’m George.”
Rachel pulls Squiggy along.
“You’re Josey’s children, aren’t you?” he say. He lifts his flask to his face and circles the space around it. “I can see it all in here.” He walks over to Rachel, bends down to her and sweeps her sandy blonde hair behind her ear. “Just like yer momma.”
Rachel backs away.
“Hold on now,” he say, kneeling and holding the back of her head to keep her still. “I’m just looking.”
A loud-talking woman passes the mouth of the road a few steps away and a pear falls from her basket. She follows its roll down the short mound and meets eyes with George there. She pauses at what I see, too: George leaning too close to Rachel.
He flips a silver coin from behind Rachel’s ear and shows it to her. Rachel gasps in delight. “Magic!”
The pear woman smiles, too, and George winks at her.
“Show me again, Mr. George! Show me how!” Rachel say.
“A good magician never tells his secrets.”
“You can tell me, suh!” she say, holding his arm, begging. He stares at the place where Rachel is touching him and she lets go directly. “I’m sorry,” she say.
“Naw . . .” George say. “You can touch me wherever you want.”
“George?” Annie calls from the main road. “You saw him in here?” she says to somebody up on the road with her—the pear woman.
“Please tell me, Mr. George,” Rachel say. “I won’t tell nobody. Promise. Please.”
“Another time,” he say, and gives her the coin. “I’ll see you again. And only because you’re special.”
40 / FLASH
Conyers, Georgia, 1848
ALBERT’S BEEN LOOKING different around the face since he got burnt up twelve weeks ago. Thick scars have risen from under his skin like it’s been burrowed through. Other skin is yanked back in some places, slanting his eyes and spreading his bottom lip wider than it should be. The hairs left on his head are long and in thin bunches while the rest of his head’s got shiny bald spots, like flat rocks in high grass.
Albert got his name from iron even before the fire. Before he was born. Iron is black metal. Smith, a craftsman. A blacksmith. But right now, Albert is just iron. I been doing the smithing. “Don’t be afraid of the metal,” he said. “It won’t hit you back.” But metal is not what I’m afraid of. I suspect he know that, too. He’s been asking me to start the coal fire in the forge for him and it amazes me how forges can hold the greatest heat inside ’em. Like brick ovens, they are, turning the blackest iron orange-hot. Inside it, wild fire can be controlled. Bellows send large flames lapping and can send the same fire to a low burn. But if you get it wrong, there’s only a bucket of water nearby.
Albert asks me to place the iron evenly in the fire pot, not on the coal. Asks me to give him his hammers, but some of ’em three pounds. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. But fire’s already changed everything.
Albert made me give him a piece of mirror the other day. He stared at hisself, turned his head slowly from side to side, raised his hand to touch his face. He told me, “No use in crying.”
And that time, I didn’t stop myself crying for him.
I cried because I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have the face I was born to make.
I cried because being negro is hard enough.
I cried because I wished I had his courage. And because, in that moment, I was certain that even if he didn’t want for me to be his family, I wanted him to be my friend.
Cynthia once told me that a man and woman could never be friends. Said, “Sex’ll always get in the way ’cause men are lazy. A woman friend is what you call convenient.”
But Albert ain’t lazy.
And me and him rely on each other now. Every day and in most ways, we do. For things most men and women not related or married would never have the pleasure to share.
There ain’t many secrets between us now.
&nbs
p; That’s my fault because I thought he was a dying man when I spoke to him honest and open about my regrets. And I figure his secrets are gone now, too, since I spent the first three weeks working on his toileting. “Life is funny,” he said. “When the shame goes, what’s left to do?”
I sneak up on Albert and slowly reach for a bunch of his hair with my scissor blades open. Before I can snip it, he spins me around, holds both my wrists in one of his hands, laughing. He say, “You trying to take away my power, Delilah?”
He crisscrosses my arms in front of me, making me hug my own seven-months-pregnant belly and he scratches in my armpit. “What you gon’ do now, Delilah?”
“Let me cut it,” I say. “Just a little off the top. Even it up.” He keeps flicking his finger in my pit. We laughing. We take care of each other.
And this morning, he took care of me.
I had lost my voice in the night and had gone to bed speechless. I don’t know if it was my talking too much that done it, or being out in the cold, or the coughing, but I lost it and Albert wanted to heal me.
I pretended to be ’sleep while I watched him tiptoe around our new living area. His back was against the stone wall he just built floor to ceiling to separate our new space from his shop. Ours is ten feet by ten feet, the ceiling is eight feet high to match his shop. “Mostly fireproof,” he said, except for the doorway in the wall that leads to his work.
We both sleep on the same side of the door even though we ain’t married. I sleep on my bed mat on the floor, and Albert sleeps across the room in a padded chair next to the oven. We eat and sleep on this side now.
And this morning, I was watching him go across the floor on the balls of his quiet feet. He started bothering his “secret” stash of liquor behind the box where he keeps his spare tools. This hiding place wasn’t his best kept secret since all the bottle necks of his liquor stick up and over the box—a line of sight from my pillow—so I cain’t say (and be honest) that I’ve never took my liberties with ’em. That’s why when he woke me up this morning and only gave me a stingy swallow of his expensive Talisker whisky, I had to gag on it a little to pretend it was new to me.
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