Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “That one’s sick,” the woman said.

  “She’s little,” Joseph said, “and she’s tired is all.”

  A second woman came to the porch. She had thin yellow hair and round blue eyes, and she was heavy with child. “We got this and some milk.” She held out a pan of cornbread to Joseph, who took it with a snatch. Baby didn’t move.

  “That little one looks sick to me.” She rested hands on her belly, absentmindedly feeling for movement.

  The older woman said, “All those woods and this gotta come to my front door.”

  “Well, she can’t just stay under the house, all curled up like a doodlebug.”

  Joseph ate the cornbread, held out his cup for the milk. He held it out a second time, and a third, but by then the pitcher was empty.

  “Get her out of here, boy.”

  “You wouldn’t turn out a sick dog like that,” the pregnant woman said.

  “I’d shoot it, is what I’d do.”

  As if she’d not heard, the yellow-haired woman said, “Listen to me now, boy. Down the bottom of that far lot, there’s a lean-to. The roof’s good and there’s hay to make it easy. You could shelter there.”

  Wordlessly, Joseph picked up the two bundles.

  “Down the road, across that fenced pasture, past that rise,” the woman repeated. “A couple of pines on the left. Right there.”

  Joseph nodded. He picked up Baby, holding her in the crook of his arm. He had to walk very slowly, his heels striking the ground hard with each step.

  It had been a mule lot once. You could see where the fences had been, and the tree trunks were still galled by the animals’ constant rubbing. The shed was small, no more than ten feet long, and half filled with hay. The side shutters sagged open, and a few boards were missing across the back, but the slab roof looked solid and new. They settled there to wait out the term of Baby’s sickness.

  She did not remember much, only the sweet smell of the hay, the noise of the birds, the whistling of the black man as he drove the mule team to work in the mornings. She followed his song as it thinned and faded, until all that was left were bits and pieces, torn apart by the intervening air, drifting down across the ridges like leaves from a tree.

  She shook with fever; her teeth chattered with chill; her knees and elbows puffed and stiffened.

  Joseph stayed with her, sitting just outside, sometimes whittling and sometimes practicing with his throwing knife. And twice a day he went to the farm for food.

  The older woman asked, “Boy, is that baby still alive?”

  Joseph nodded, eyes on the plate in her hand. He held out his own empty pan.

  “What about that sore on her leg?” She transferred the food in one sliding motion.

  He shook his head, eyes sliding up to her face, slyly, betraying nothing.

  “You think I didn’t see? Don’t be a fool, boy. You got to put carrot scrapings on it. Like these.”

  He nodded. She handed him a heap of yellow-brown carrot shreds in a piece of thin old cloth.

  “Don’t eat it, you ain’t that hungry. Put them parings right on the sore and tie them on with that cloth. You don’t touch it until tomorrow, then you come back and get some more.”

  “Her knees is swelled.” His voice sounded harsh and rusty. He was surprised to hear himself speak. “She don’t never rest.”

  “Breakbone fever,” the woman said shortly, turning away. “If there’s a God of niggers, you better be praying to him.”

  In the shelter Baby lay curled in a ball, a tiny black spot on the surface of the earth. She drank whatever Joseph held to her mouth; she whimpered with pain whenever he touched her swollen arms and legs. The black man from the farm left his team one morning to bring her a cup of slippery-elm tea sweetened with honey. She screamed at the sight of his unfamiliar face and clenched her teeth when he put the tin cup to her lips. Joseph fed it to her later.

  In the cooling days of fall, Baby’s fever ended. She crawled on hands and knees from the matted straw to sit in the bright yellow fading sun. She discovered a small hollow between two large boulders. The sun reached there early; the rocks held its heat all day long and far into the night. She lay there day after day, dozing and waiting, drinking from the cup of water Joseph left for her.

  Joseph now worked at the farm. He picked cucumbers and tomatoes and green beans and brought the filled baskets to the kitchen porch. He dug potatoes, gathered pumpkins from the field, pulled sweet corn for eating, and stacked field-corn sheaves. He was slow and sullen and clumsy. The women shouted instructions and screamed complaints at him. He did not learn. He did not remember what he had been taught.

  One morning Baby stirred and opened her eyes and knew that Joseph was gone. Not to the farm for food, not to the fields to work. He had tired of waiting and had gone on without her.

  As usual he’d left her a cup of water. Four or five gnats floated on its surface; she felt them tickle her throat as she drank. The black man came, but she covered her face and would not talk to him. He left food for her, and filled the cup with water. She waited for him to leave before touching it.

  He came again on the second day, again with food. On the third morning, Joseph was back, bringing her a dish of mush and syrup before he went to the fields.

  Baby grew stronger; she could walk to the edge of the cornfield; she could climb the steep pine slopes, though she moved slowly, panting.

  Joseph was restless. Each night, though she never once saw him leave, he was gone. She banked their small fire, had a final drink of water (the fever had left her always thirsty), and walked across the pastures to the farmhouse where the two white women lived. She sat quietly, on the far side of the stream, in the shadow of a scrub apple tree, and watched. At first dark, the gray-haired woman lit a lamp. The yellow light ran out the window, crossing the sill like flowing water, to empty itself into the dark. The two women faced each other across the kitchen table, hands busy, heads nodding. When they went to bed, when the window was only a flat empty square, Baby walked back by starlight. In the clear fall nights the earth cooled quickly, and she shivered occasionally.

  One night she stayed long after the house was dark. With the gray glittering galaxies to light her way, she crossed the little river, low this dry time of year, hopping from rock to rock. The yard dogs noticed her and came to the fence to watch. She circled past the house, the kitchen garden, the well house, the chicken yard, dogs shadowing her inside the fence. Past the two smokehouses, new-roofed. Mule pens. A big hay shed. The cow barn, lower door closed, small high window left open. She stopped, the dogs in front of her. Saw the white oak, growing just outside the fence, slender arching branches reaching over the barn. Slowly, because she was still weak, she climbed the tree, inched along a high branch. It bent gently, lowering her to the roof. The dogs watched, curious and unalarmed, as she slipped down the roof and wiggled through the small window.

  Inside was rank and warm and dark. The still close air was heavy with the sweet moist breaths of six cows. They stirred restlessly at her presence, grumbling, shifting. She backed into a corner under the feeding trough and fell asleep at once.

  Something nudged her side, lifted her slightly. She opened her eyes slowly, saw heavy laced boots, coated with straw and dung.

  “You.” She recognized the voice of the black man.

  She was still sleepy and in no hurry to leave the darkness under the feeding trough. She didn’t move.

  “How come the dogs let you get in here? You put a charm on them?” A cow wheezed and stamped. “Get over, Bess.” A slap of hand on rump, the thump of a wooden stool. Then the noisy rattle of milk into a pail.

  She saw his black hands moving, saw the empty foolish face of the cow, its silent gratification.

  “Come here now, girl.”

  She crawled out. Beyond the open barn door the day was bright and clear; its chilly air cut into the warm layers of barn odors.

  “Come round over this side where I can see you.” He went o
n with his milking. “By rights you ought to be dead of fever, not sneaking into barns.”

  Through the door, a shape floating against the radiant morning, a gray-and-white cat, tail held high, picked her way delicately across the floor to sit at the man’s side. Perfectly still. Waiting. Expecting.

  “You ready?” he said to the cat and shot a short spurt of milk toward her. Her mouth opened, caught. Ever so carefully, she licked the rest from her whiskers, her paws, her chest.

  Baby moved closer to him, her eyes on his hands. Next to the cat she stopped. Asking.

  The jet of milk hit her face with such force that she choked swallowing it.

  One morning, Baby woke early, before clear light. During the night a spider had spun a web across the corner of the door; in it a captured deerfly buzzed and thrashed. She heard a single pinecone rattle down, bouncing end over end. A small wind made a ragged uneven hiss in the needles and branches overhead. Crows called, their voices rising and falling as they swung in wide circles. Baby sat up—and there it was, gurgling in her veins, like a stream over rocks: the knowledge that it was time to move, that the roof was too tight atop her head, that the world was too small. Again.

  Joseph packed their bedrolls, their cup and pan, the extra food. Then, methodically, he pulled the sagging shutters from the windows, smashed them into kindling against a rock. He whittled a pile of tinder. Deliberately, carefully, he began setting the shelter afire. It was difficult, the hay was damp, but he kept at it patiently, until little wisps of smoke appeared in a dozen places. A small rat ran out and disappeared into the brush.

  Day after day Baby followed Joseph. Sometimes his figure seemed wrapped in shining fog and sometimes she saw him as the distant end of a long black tunnel. Once when it rained, a hard thunder-filled downpour, they took shelter in an abandoned mill. The big stones were still in place, but the gears were blocked by rust, the belts decayed into tattered flapping strips. Most of the roof had collapsed in a tangle of beams, leaving only one small dry area. They spent the rest of the day and the night there, while rain poured down the walls all around them, and Baby watched the millstones appear and disappear, blue-white in the lightning.

  Once they managed to climb into an empty railroad car and spent a whole day rolling effortlessly over the surface of the earth, the steady beat of the rails counting time for them. So many fields and trees and towns drifted past the open door they grew tired of watching, and Joseph began a game of solitaire. At a switching stop a white man swung into their car, a young man, with blond hair and a thin face and a bundle in his hand. Like theirs.

  He gave them a long silent look and moved to the far end of the car. Joseph stopped playing cards and held a knife in each hand; the shadowy daylight outlined the blades. The three watched each other, hour after hour. When they pulled into another siding—when a fast passenger train overtook them—the blond man swung off and disappeared.

  Another time, a state trooper stopped them. “You from around here?” he asked.

  Joseph shook his head.

  “Where you going?”

  “Mobile,” Joseph said, as he always did.

  “Ain’t he kind of little for roadwalking?”

  “That’s my sister and we are going to our people in Mobile.”

  “Get in,” the policeman said. “I’ll give you a lift.”

  The motion of the car made Baby sleepy, so that she heard the white man’s voice from far off. “Beats walking, kid.” And then, “This is as far as I go.”

  They got out obediently. “Hey, you,” the policeman said to Baby, “take this.” He put a nickel in her palm, closed her fingers on it.

  She held her hand tightly shut, feeling the metal press into her flesh. She wanted to look at it, study it, turn it over in the light, but Joseph was already moving and she had to keep up with him. She put the coin in her mouth for safekeeping.

  Now the earth beneath their feet was dark red and deep black by turns. The fields were gone to weeds and half the houses stood empty, windows blank, doors missing from their hinges. They slept inside every night now, dry and warm by a fire in a proper fireplace. Every morning Joseph took the coals, blew them into life, and tossed them up on the roof. Sometimes they even waited awhile to see if the house would burn.

  They travelled through new pine forests, young trees in endless neat rows, through wide pastures, carefully wire fenced, green with rye, speckled with shade trees, dotted with herds. An airplane flew overhead and they stopped to watch its shadow run across the grass. They heard the far-off sound of a sawmill before the wind changed and the thin wisp of sound blew away. Two horses nuzzled their hands, then galloped away at a sudden movement. Everywhere in the woods were scuppernong vines, heavy with fruit; they left them for the raccoons and the birds.

  They crossed a railroad bridge over a small river that ran deep and fast between high banks to follow a gravelled road into a wide valley. After a couple of hours they came to an iron gate. On the high overhead arch was a name. Joseph could not puzzle out the letters; he had forgotten most of his reading. Beyond the gate, half a mile of green lawns sloped up from the river to a large white house with columns all around. Peacocks strutted and fanned. A black woman in a stiff white apron was sweeping the porch. She stopped to stare at them, shading her eyes.

  They moved on at their usual slow pace between the lines of neat white fences, passing other buildings: barns and men working in them; stables, where two colts played in the near field; row on row of smokehouses; a garage where a man worked on a tractor; lines of greenhouses, thousands of glass panes winking in the light; flower gardens pruned and trimmed and waiting for the winter; vegetable gardens, bare and hilled against the frost; orchards, leafless now.

  A truck overtook them, stopped. The driver, tall, thin, black, a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, said, “Get in back and I’ll give you a ride off the place.”

  They did, dangling their feet over the tailgate, watching gravel spin up under the wheels. Past endless pastures, woods, a second house, small copy of the first, with its own small stable and barn and garage.

  The truck jolted to a stop, throwing them on their backs. The driver stuck his head out the window. “That there’s the public road.” He pointed to the two lanes of blacktop. “Choose your direction and keep going.”

  He watched them for a while, then turned back, clouds of yellow dust marking his passage.

  For an hour or so they followed the road, then moved into the shelter of the trees, climbing (as Joseph always did) to the highest ridges. The following day they found a place for their camp—a steep gullied slope, dense with fallen trees and heavy underbrush, studded with granite boulders that glowed green in the moonlight. From the top of the biggest boulder, they could see the length of the entire valley, could see cattle grazing in pastures and hogs turned into cornfields to fatten before slaughter, and white specks of sheep on one far slope. They could hear the flat metallic clank of bells as the dairy herd moved back and forth twice a day. Now and then they heard shouts and whistles. They heard hammering and sawing, the sputtering backfires of truck engines, and the deep rough rumbling of tractors at work. An unfamiliar sound—they listened carefully.

  In a narrow space between two boulders they made a frame of fallen tree limbs, spread their tarpaulin, added more brush on top. The ground was soft, inches deep in leaf mold, smelling dank and sweet and secret. Nearby a small spring ran from a crack in the rock face into a shallow basin, slippery with algae.

  Baby stayed here, never moving more than a few hundred feet in any direction. She played all day, building toy houses of rocks and sticks and weaving small twigs into roofs. With her own knife she whittled furniture for them—tables and chairs and beds with rabbit-fur covers. As soon as she finished one house she immediately began another. She did not make any people to live in them; her houses were always empty.

  Joseph, restless, angry, came and went, bringing her food every day, but not speaking, not even looking direc
tly at her. Baby kept her distance and her silence so that he would not fall into one of his rages. Once she stood too close to him, and he knocked her backward into the fire. The burns on her legs still hurt.

  Their daytime cooking fire burned down to a tiny red speck under its gray ash. Each cooling night was completely empty except for animal sounds and the muffled beating of owls’ wings. Baby wrapped herself in her blanket (and Joseph’s too for extra warmth) and stared up through the branches at the stars. She sang a silent song that was her own, making circles all around herself, secure and strong as steel, protective as a knife. She felt the magic rings rise around her like the walls of a house, enclosing her completely. Then she fell asleep.

  At first she thought they were dream sounds without meaning or sense to them. Then she thought that the wind had come up suddenly and was blowing down the slopes the way it did before a rain, and she pulled the blanket over her head. Then she heard stones rattling down the slope and thought a large animal like a deer or maybe a bear must be moving. She settled all these sounds into her dream, wrapped them all around by soft black breathing into the blanket folds.

  She woke to a bird’s cry. Or a man’s whistle. She recognized the sounds now. Human sounds, four or five men, shouting to each other on the slope above her, coming down. She wondered where Joseph was. And what she should do. She saw brief stabs of light overhead, like flickering summer lightning. She wanted Joseph. She called to him silently, asking which way to run. When no answer came, she curled up tightly inside the shelter, pressing hard against the earth, hiding behind her own closed eyes.

  Then she was being crushed. She screamed aloud, a small whine like a cat. The earth surged upward, she hurtled into the air, dangling in a large black fist. She kicked and squirmed, then froze and stiffened. A voice was roaring: Here, here. Pinned in the beam of a torch, she stopped breathing, stopped moving, only her heart pounded against her ribs, saying, Run, run. The hand holding her shuddered, relaxed. She fell, then a heavy body fell across her. She pulled free, crouched, paralyzed, whimpering. She smelled the prickly sweet smell of blood. A torch was caught in the brush, still burning. In its dim glow she saw the man next to her. He was on hands and knees, heaving, retching, struggling. There was a knife in his back, high on his shoulder. She saw the handle clearly, recognized it. Joseph had carved that design, that twining twisting vine with its small round leaves. It was his throwing knife. Now it stuck in a plaid wool jacket.