by Terry Persun
“Listen.”
Leon sat up and focused on his father’s face.
“You listenin’?” He pointed the revolver at Leon again.
Leon crabbed backward, crawling away from the black iris of the barrel. Would his father really pull that trigger? Perhaps a blessing if so.
“You have to think white. You have to read white. You have to speak white.” Big Leon spit and it landed near Leon’s hand. “I don’t truss ‘em.” He grabbed Leon by the neck and lifted him onto his feet. “I know too much. You been used to kill me. Everybody use you to kill somebody else or somebody inside they self.” He shook his head and walked off. “It ain’t you fault, but you might get kilt for it.”
Leon stood and watched as Big Leon left the field and entered the woods.
Leon’s knees shook and his teeth chattered. He didn’t know how to think white. Even if he were evil, he couldn’t think as evil as how whites appeared to think. Leon peered into the woods after his father. He thought about the deer he’d seen. If he were to jump into the creek, he wouldn’t float to the river. He’d get hung up on a felled tree and drown. He breathed short, fearful drowning breaths.
He too hummed. Tried to forget what Hillary and he had done. All around him the field smelled of the new growth of spring. The woods let out the winter smell still, rotting leaves and a depth of cold not quite free of frost. Soon, Leon thought, the creek would peak then slow. He knew the sound. One night he’d hear the creek get quiet, the noise no longer strong enough to lift up through the woods to the six white-washed shacks.
Humming helped him to feel better, to think. The words he put with the humming reviewed his day, which started out in death, moved to orgasm, climbed into fear, and ended -- as Leon saw it -- with being evil in the eyes of those who loved him. Both Big Leon and Martha labeled him. Hillary did too in her own sinful and crazy way.
Leon thought about what his father had said. He wasn’t white, though. And he didn’t feel Negro. Besides a great uncertainty about himself and a greater uncertainty about where his life was headed, Leon sensed only guilt and fear.
No one spoke to him that night. He ate out back, alone, and cold from the night air.
When he went back inside, Bess lay in her corner, spider threads glistening in the deep dark near her head. Big Leon stood near a splintered window staring into the darkness. Martha hummed in her bed, in her corner of the room.
“My Leon,” Bess said.
Leon tensed. He was no longer anyone’s Leon, least of all Bess’s. Yet, he had been taught to respect his mother.
“Let me have your sweetness,” she said, shifting back close to the wall, leaving a space on the straw for him to lie down near her.
Leon looked at his father who let too many things go on. “No,” Leon whispered. “I’m going for a walk. I’m in a thinking way and I’m going.”
Leon noticed Big Leon smile to himself. A sign of approval?
Bess screeched, surprising them all. Then she covered her head and mumbled a long sentence that kept going even as Leon left the shack.
The cold bit hard, but he stepped lively into the darkness. The moon had remained low on the horizon and could not be seen from the woods. He knew his way to the creek. The closer he got the louder the sound and the colder the night air. At the creek flat, Leon kneeled down and hugged his knees to conserve a little body heat.
He tried to feel white, but nothing came except images of Hank and Earl and Mr. Carpenter. He couldn’t even conjure his own face. Then there were white women, but only a few. Mona, in his memory, always stared ahead, seldom looked around. It was as if she had been dead for years, like Bess was becoming dead. Mona moved slowly. Hillary had talked about how Mona mumbled, not ever saying any real words, agreeing and disagreeing with herself at the same time. The tones involved were what had made Hillary think so. And now Bess mumbled.
Thinking of Hillary also brought up other images. Her hanging breasts, thick arms, and wide, when she bent to pick up her dress, butt. Leon laughed out loud. She smelled like sweat and sweet water. Her big arms were made for work, but since she did little of that, they were flabby and soft.
He pictured lying atop that big softness and felt the itch to do it again.
Still, in his imagination, he didn’t look or feel white.
He spit onto the rocks. Moonlight edged onto the flat from behind him, scattering the pebbles and stones into shadow and light. The creek sparkled.
He pictured Big Leon, Tunny, Bud, and all the other shack people together. Picturing him with them made it plain as day that he wasn’t black either.
“I nothin’,” he said. “Evil have its own look.”
Hearing his voice, Leon heard again what Big Leon had told him that day. ‘You have to think white, read white, and speak white.’
Big Leon never said feel white. He never said be white.
Leon didn’t feel white, but he knew how to speak white. In fact, he spoke better than most whites. Leon didn’t feel black either, but he could speak black.
He spit onto the rocks again. He looked into the trees on the opposite bank. The moonlight brightened the branches and highlighted the new life, the spring buds searching for a place in the world. Was he evil? He sensed pain and sadness inside him, but also song and delight. Perhaps Mix-up was an appropriate name for his feelings as well as his heritage, as well as his appearance.
A great horned owl hooted and Leon saw it high in a tree waiting for the stirring of a mouse.
He spit once more, then stood. Cold air brushed all the newly exposed areas of his skin. He rubbed his arms. In a slow careful run Leon headed to the only family he knew.
He sneaked into the shack, undressed and lay on the cold straw floor, pulling a blanket over him. There had been a fire in the fireplace earlier, but only embers glowed now. He stared across the room into the red and black mystery of the dying fire. He listened to the shallow breathing from the other bodies who shared the shack with him. He attempted to sense a connection, a kinship, an instinct, between him and each of them. Only thoughts of Martha brought that family feeling. For Big Leon he felt respect. He felt pride. For Bess, even the thought of her made him tense up and pull back. He closed his eyes and thought of Martha again. She had been his mother and sister, his only playmate when the other children teased him.
They all lay quietly, spread around the shack to create as much privacy as possible. But there was no real privacy, only a false sense of it. Surely, everyone in the shack new what went on in there, but each in his or her own way ignored or forgot or hid behind those truths as lies, and hid behind the lies as truths.
That day Martha worked hard to break that notion down, Leon thought, then Big Leon took a step in that direction too. Even Leon had changed the course of events when he left that evening. What strange chain reaction did all that signify? What would break down next? He thought he knew the answer. He closed his eyes harder against the thought. His mind racing, Leon lay still until he fell off to sleep.
* * *
Leon woke groggy and slow. Bess had already gone off to the big house. Big Leon stood naked, raising his pants from the floor. Martha sat with her head turned from Big Leon.
Noticing Leon’s movements, she said, “Don’t think Leon should do no white chores today. Got a bad feelin’.”
“Not ours to say,” Big Leon said.
“If you need him more? You could say that. You boss of it.”
Big Leon looked over at Leon then pulled on his shirt. “Feed him. I’ll see.”
“What are you feeling?” Leon asked.
“Feelin’ those boys a his gonna be rammin’. They gonna feel righteous.”
Big Leon left without another word.
“I don’t care,” Leon said.
“This is a bad time, boy, a bad time. People be confused what’s right. They feelin’ guilt now it’s too late. They want to hide their guilt behind wrong doin’s. You don’t get in the way of that, you hear?”
“I hear you, but I don’t know what I can do about it. Like Pa said, ‘Ain’t our say.’”
“Don’t mock your pa’s speakin’ ways.”
Leon pulled on his clothes. “I didn’t mean to. I was just saying what he said.”
Martha got up to feed him. “He tole me what he tole you in the field.”
She put a chunk of bread in his hands.
“What was that?”
“You know. You doin’ it. You talkin’ white. You remember how to do that. It save your life out there.” She pointed out the window. “I’m thinkin’ you be workin’ with your pa today.”
“I’m not afraid.” Leon bit off some bread and walked outside. He skipped heading for the barn and went straight to the house, collecting the kitchen garbage from the back. The kitchen help heard him and someone he didn’t recognize peeked out at him, then jerked back inside.
After he had everything bagged, Leon carried two bags at a time into the woods. As was his habit, he emptied the bags and sat for a moment.
He watched three squirrels appear from nowhere and chase one another along a felled tree, up another, and across a branch to a third tree. Their tails fluffed and twitched. They chattered and ran, bumping into one another, rollicking and chattering some more. He laughed at their play and wished for the return of his own innocence. When he decided to retrieve two more bags from the main house, the squirrels scurried away. Leon looked into the ravine. The run flowed steadily, still high from thaw. He breathed deeply, letting out a long relaxing breath, then repeated the act allowing his shoulders to loosen and drop.
Two more bags, another, shorter stay in the woods, and Leon headed for the barn. Hank and Earl weren’t there. Leon knew the chores that needed to be done and set to work filling feed bins and water buckets, setting hay and cleaning stalls for when the horses came back that evening. He worked until early afternoon, deciding to ready a place for new hay even though that was months off. He didn’t mind organizing bales and cleaning the bays. He enjoyed the calmness of the broom swing. In all, the first part of the day went smoothly. Leon did what he knew to do.
He stopped in to see Martha, but she was working in one of the other shacks. He scooped some water and broke some bread to eat while heading out to Big Leon.
Spring plowing also meant rock collecting. It seemed no matter how many years the fields had been planted, about the only thing the ground grew consistently was rocks. Every spring a new crop had to be gathered and added to the stone fence barely inside the woods.
“They’s less of ‘em every year,” Big Leon said, but it always seemed there were the same number to Leon.
“The land just chucks ‘em up,” Leon said.
Five men and seven children stood abreast and walked each field up and down, pulling and passing they called it. The rocks accumulated in number as they were handed, thrown, or kicked from the center to the edges of the field.
Leon, coming on late, was told to gather and stack, which meant he’d work alone. He’d take the stones from the edge of the field into the woods and add them to the fence. Since the planting fields were rotated, a fence would grow in size slowly over the years. Once high enough, new fences would be started, or old ones curved to section off a new area.
Leon gathered and stacked. The wide band of black men and boys walking up through the field were too far away to talk to.
This activity continued from field to field until the last field was stripped of rock, then a flurry of work hovered around the stacks until the fence stacking job was complete. Even then, Leon worked around many people, but remained alone.
That evening, Leon walked down to the creek flat before nightfall and found Hillary waiting. Excitement and fear stood side by side when he recognized her form in the half-light.
“I brought a new book.”
Leon couldn’t wait to read whatever it was she had. “What is it?”
She held it toward him. “One of my mama’s. Pa said I could have whatever I liked.”
Leon took the book. “Henry W. Longfellow,” he read. “I’ve never read poetry except the Bible.”
Hillary beamed. “It’s pretty new.”
“But she didn’t read lately, did she?” Leon asked.
“I think when alone she might have been different.” She went to touch Leon on the chest. He stiffened. “What is it?” she said.
“I don’t like to be touched.”
“You mean by me.”
“No. I just have to be ready. It’s all right. I just get tickled at first.”
“It seemed like you were all right before.”
“Miss Hillary, please, you have your Jacob.” Leon held the book to his chest, partly for protection and partly to possess it.
“I been thinking about what we did. Sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong,” Hillary told him.
“It’s not right.”
“You don’t like me ‘cause I’m not skinny and pretty.”
“No. No. I didn’t say that.” He stumbled back a step.
“I’ll tell you, though, skinny girls don’t have a bosom like mine.”
Leon closed his eyes as Hillary opened her dress. In his mind he could see her, though. Her breasts reminded him of Martha’s when he was younger and used to watch her wash. They reminded him of a human warmth that was almost gone from his life now.
Hillary took his hand and leaned into it.
Leon shook his head back and forth protesting what he knew he would do. “My body ain’t listenin’ no more,” he said.
“It’s listening to the call of nature, that’s all.” Hillary led Leon to a soft bed of pine needles hid by low branches.
Leon’s actions and emotions shot in opposing directions. Fear rose inside him even as he let his trousers fall to the ground. He understood sex as a weapon and a pleasure. After the pleasure of release, fear dominated.
Hillary cried afterwards, claiming, once again, that her body had sinned like her father’s had before her.
Leon could not feel any worse. Nothing good could come from their act but the act itself. What’s more, she could break down, or worse yet have a two-headed child, as his imagination told him. He remembered her soft body and strong breath, the pungent and sweet scent of their bodies after lovemaking. He often thought of them together when they were not together.
Hillary let Leon take books home to read. No one would find them missing, she told him.
Leon read by the dying embers and by morning’s first light. He read to remember and he read to forget.
CHAPTER 6
You stinkin’ like sin,” Martha said.
“It’s the fish fryin’.” Leon uncovered a book from his sleeping corner.
“Don’t hide in that there thing.”
“I’m not.”
“But you will. I knows you better’n you knows you.”
“I’ll wash then.”
“Can’t wash sin away, not even with lye.”
“Leave me alone. There’s more sinnin’ going on around here than in hell itself,” Leon said.
“Not in my place.”
“Your place is a corner. In your corner there’s hummin’ that’s supposed to keep everything out. But outside your hummin’ door, there’s evil beyond thought.”
Martha slapped a hand to her thigh as though she were reprimanding a dog. “You stop. It’s the white man put this in our house. We juss play-actors in a white man’s animal-sick play. Now you stuck twice in it.”
“I know what you mean. But I only got stuck in it once. When I was too young to fight. When I was too young to know better. Because of it, my pa hardly comes home and my ma is going crazy.”
“You stop right there. You respect—“
“You don’t respect her.”
Martha’s brow tightened.
“The truth,” Leon said. “She sinned me out of her body to kill Pa. Pa freed me to kill her. And, maybe to save me, though I ain’t his to save.”
Martha stood s
ilent and firm, as though the truth had never been spoken so clearly or so openly.
“Nothing is said here. Everything is covered over like putting straw over horse shit. In books people talk,” Leon said.
“We ain’t books. And you ain’t talkin’ to that girl.”
“You’ve always been more mama to me than my mama been,” he said through tears. I want you to see.”
“I see, but I don’t know that you see.”
Leon slumped down and sat on the floor, letting the book drop to his side. “I’m scared.”
Martha grabbed his arms and lifted him to his feet. She held him in front of her.
“I can’t stop and she won’t let me stop,” Leon admitted.
“It’s a tangle in a web. It all sticky and sweet, frightful and glorious.”
“What do I do?”
“It can only lead to no good, boy. You tell that girl, you done. It not right. She knowed it ain’t right too. She can see. She juss as tangled as you. She juss as sorry and juss as glad. Somebody got to be strong.”
“I’m not strong enough.”
“You as strong as you pa, but you don’t know it.”
“My pa’s a white man who can’t whip a nigger boy.”
Martha pushed him away. “Your pa the man who here. He the man who teach you farmin’. He the man who set you free.”
Leon ran out of the shack, the smell of trout burning in the pan behind him.
Big Leon came down the path.
Leon pushed by him.
“You stayin’ for dinner,” Big Leon said.
Leon ignored him.
“Boy!”
Leon ran to the creek, not the flat, but where it straightened, where maple and pine stood in small groves near the edge. Leon flowed with the creek, swift and deep. He yelled at the woods. He cried with the insects, sirens of the quick life, the sudden death.
Stepping too close to the bank, he slipped and soaked his foot. The water felt cool on that hot night. The woods breathed humidity and the scent of loam. A crow cawed and flew off. Leon wondered why black birds could rule much of the area, when black men could not.