Of Ashes and Dust

by Marc Graham

  “Easy, now,” Doc said softly as he tested his grip about Pa’s ankle.

  Without warning, he yanked on Pa’s leg, and the bone slid beneath the flesh. Despite the laudanum, Pa screamed and fought as Bull and Mister Barnes tried to keep him down. His thrashing flung Mama against the porch rail, and her face went from white to grey.

  “Hold him,” Doc ordered, and the men struggled to obey.

  Pa let out a moan, and his eyes rolled back as he went still.

  “That’s the trick. Well done,” Doc said. He poured a different medicine where the bone had poked through, then began splinting the busted leg.

  “Sarah?” Missus Barnes said. She moved to Mama’s side, gently shook her and patted her cheek. “Doctor,” she cried.

  “Just a moment, Charlotte,” he said.

  “Now,” she insisted, as a dark pool of blood spread beneath Mama’s dress.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Britton, Arkansas—August 1852

  “Get me that one, Jimmy.”

  Becca’s nose pressed against the display cabinet. Her breath fogged the glass while her fingers left narrow smudges.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she affirmed, and licked her lips hungrily.

  “Two licorice sticks, please,” I said to the storekeeper.

  Becca handed me her penny—the reward for having lost her first tooth—and I slid it across the counter. The grocer handed over the candy, and Becca clapped her hands and hopped in anticipation.

  “Make it last,” I cautioned her, and she nodded as she grabbed the treat.

  We stepped outside into the sticky August air. Becca bit off a piece of licorice, made a point of slowly chewing it, then stuck her tongue out at me, wide-mouthed so I could see the black mush. I grinned back at her with a bit of the candy plastered to my front teeth.

  “You look just like me,” she lisped through her gap.

  “You two ’bout ready?” Pa said, grit in his voice.

  He stood with Ma and Doc Aubry across the street from the general store. The black oak in the doctor’s front yard provided shade, but offered little comfort against summer’s sweaty grip. Ma fanned herself and dabbed a handkerchief at her perspiration, while Pa just looked hot and annoyed. His green eyes sparkled a little when Becca ran to him and leapt into his arms.

  After he’d had his accident and Ma lost the baby, Becca’s birth a couple years later was the first time I could remember him smiling. She could always lighten his mood, but his usual scowl returned when he looked at me. His face darkened even more as his gaze fell on my sling.

  “Let’s see that arm,” Doc Aubry said.

  He eased my right arm out of the sling, then tested all my finger, wrist and elbow joints. I did my best to mask the pain, but couldn’t help taking a sharp breath and grimacing when he stretched the busted arm a little farther than it wanted to go.

  “That’s fine,” he judged as he settled the sling back in place. “A few more weeks and you’ll be right as rain.”

  “A few more weeks and it’s harvest time,” Pa pointed out, more a reminder to me than the doctor.

  “True,” Doc said, “and I expect the boy’ll be able to help out just fine.”

  Pa grunted at that.

  “We’d better get, if we’re to make home by dinnertime. Thanks, Doc,” he said, patting the bottle-shaped bulge in his pocket.

  Doc’s face clouded over.

  “I need you to try cutting back on the . . .” He glanced down at Becca and me. “On the medicine. If the leg’s still giving you pain after all this time, maybe there’s something else we can do about it.”

  Pa set Becca down, shifted the gnarled hickory cane to his left hand and extended his right to shake the doctor’s hand.

  “This’ll be the last one, I promise,” he said. “We’ll have the rest of the payment for you soon as we can, once Lefty here gets back to work.”

  He looked pointedly at me with that last bit, and I turned my head away.

  “Don’t you worry about that, Jim,” Doc said. “You’ll get it to me when you get it to me. And you, young man,” he added, patting my shoulder, “stay out of any more trees for a while.”

  “Yes, sir,” I mumbled, then turned to follow Pa and Ma toward home.

  Becca grabbed my left hand, but I shook loose and curled my arm beneath the sling, folding in on myself as I gave in to self-pity.

  It wasn’t as though I’d meant to fall from the tree. The Barneses had us over on Independence Day for a picnic, and the great black walnut tree was too tempting for a boy to ignore. Matty and I had shinnied up the trunk while our parents and sisters relaxed on blankets in the shade.

  Matty stopped at the first branch—just a few feet off the ground—when Missus Barnes cried that he was too high. I kept going, though, higher and higher. Was it to show up Matty? To impress Mister Barnes, or win Pa’s approval? Maybe it was to get Angelina’s attention, something that had become more and more important to me of late. Or maybe it was just to climb, to rise above and escape from the world below.

  Whatever it was that drove me, I made my way to the very top of the tree, steadied myself on the thin branches and peeked above the leaves. The world spread out below me like one of Ma’s patchwork quilts. The land was a checkerboard of fields, rimmed by hedgerows and centered on the shade trees that provided a midday harbor for me and the field slaves as we worked the crops. In the distance, the great bend of the Arkansas winked lazily under the midsummer sun.

  I looked down and could hardly make out the faces some fifty feet below. The tree limbs shook as I shifted my weight, and my foot slipped from the crook of the branch that supported me. I started to fall, but caught the branch in the pit of my arm. I gripped the limb with both hands and dangled there for a moment to catch my breath. When I looked down again, seven pairs of wide eyes gaped up at me. I forced a laugh, then waved down with one hand while I pedaled my feet like the velocipede rider I’d seen at the fair.

  With a loud snap, the limb gave way and I plunged toward the ground. Branches raced past me. Leaves and twigs tore at my skin and snagged on my faded hickory-cloth trousers and burlap shirt. I mused briefly that Ma would soon have more scrap material for her quilts, then screamed as one of the thick lower limbs came straight toward my head. I awoke at Doc Aubry’s with bandages wrapped around my head and a heavy plaster cast on my arm.

  For weeks after, I’d been of no use to anyone as I suffered through a hot, sticky, itchy summer. Becca had sat by my bed and made up stories that I only half heard and now could not remember at all. Ma fussed over me and kept telling me to rest up so I could heal good and proper. Pa would look in from time to time—to see if I was still breathing, I guess—then just grunt, shake his head and turn away.

  Guilt settled uneasily atop the pain of my injuries, at being unable to work while I recovered. Pa’s leg was never quite right again after his accident. He had enough trouble just getting around our little homestead to split wood, let alone walking the mile to Barnes’s and working the fields all day. When he wasn’t in a stupor from the laudanum, he brought in some carpentry work, while Ma took in laundry and mending, and worked on quilts to sell to the peddler man who came by every couple of months.

  As soon as I was old enough, I started working for Mister Barnes. At first I just hauled water and mucked out stalls. As I got bigger, I began working with the slaves in the fields, or in the woods gathering timber. The hard labor and Belle’s lunches had worked together so that, now twelve, I was nearly as tall as Pa, and already starting to fill out.

  “Ho there, Balaam.”

  The call interrupted my gloomy thoughts and I looked up, surprised to see Zeke drawing in the reins on his mule.

  “How-do, Marse Jim, Miz Robbins,” he said, raising his straw hat in greeting.

  “How are you, Zeke?” Ma asked.

  “Fine, ma’am, just fine,” he said. “Marse Barnes told me to come fetch Marse Jade here, if he’s up to it. We g
ot to start clearing out the corn cribs to make room for the harvest.”

  “Fine by me,” Pa answered for me. “About time he got back to work.”

  “And Miz Barnes sent these along, too,” Zeke went on. “Belle’s mulberry jam—best in the county.” He leaned down from the mule and handed the jars to Becca, red and white checked toppers tied around the lids. “Don’t go eating that all at once,” he cautioned her, then playfully tapped her button nose.

  “Thank you, Zeke,” Ma said. “Give Belle my thanks, and tell Charlotte I hope to visit her soon.”

  “I’m sure she’d like that, ma’am. You ready, boy?” he asked me, and held a hand out to me.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  I gripped his wrist, swung up onto the mule and wrapped my good arm around him. Balaam shuffled and brayed in protest as I settled in behind Zeke.

  “Hush up,” Zeke told him. “We won’t keep him too late,” he promised, then kicked the heels of his bare feet into the mule’s ribs and steered him back up the road.

  “Keep him as long as you need,” Pa called out after us, and I could feel his glare on the back of my head.

  “How’s that arm doing?” Zeke asked over the clop of Balaam’s hooves.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Hmph. That don’t sound fine.”

  “Then I reckon it ain’t my arm that’s bothering me,” I said.

  “Your pappy’s a good man,” Zeke said, readily catching my meaning. “If he’s hard on you, maybe it’s just to get you ready for life.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means life’s hard, boy. Ain’t no place for softies or lay-abouts. You wanna make something for yourself in this world, you got to be tough.”

  “I don’t see how that’s enough to help,” I said. “Pa’s maybe the strongest man I know—even with his bum leg—and what’s that gonna do for him? He ain’t never gonna own his own land, won’t ever be more’n a sharecropper, taking on other people’s chores. Some things you’re born to, and that’s that. And some things are always gonna be out of your reach, no matter how hard you work or how strong you are.”

  “We talking ’bout your pappy, now, or someone else?” he said.

  My cheeks grew hot, and I was thankful Zeke couldn’t see my embarrassment.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Aw, come on, Marse Jade. I seen how you look at Miz Angelina. Now don’t get all in a flutter,” he said as I tensed and tightened my grip on him. “I don’t reckon no one’s noticed but me. And even if they have, ain’t no harm in that. She’s a right pretty girl. They’s nothing wrong with having your heart tug away at you in her direction.”

  Just the thought of Angelina made me forget my troubles for the moment, and brought a grin to my face. In my mind I could see her long, deep-auburn hair catching the sunlight, her cool, green eyes ablaze with life above a pert, freckled nose and full, crimson lips that wrapped daintily around a laughing smile. I thought of the willowy, graceful figure that had bloomed out of a gangling adolescence. The thin, boyish frame of a year earlier had transformed into that of a distinctly feminine mold, and the twin buds developing on her formerly flat chest stirred a strange yearning deep inside me.

  “What’s the point?” I asked, as reality overcame infatuation. “I ain’t nothing but a hired hand, the son of a sharecropper. I just need to remember my place, not go trying to get above my station.”

  “Maybe,” Zeke said. “But at least you free to try or not, free to make that choice for yourself. Your family may not have much, and maybe you got to work side by side with us niggers, but they’s a world of difference ’tween being poor and free, and being a slave.”

  “Did you talk to Mister Barnes?” I asked sheepishly, shamed by my self-pity.

  “Oh, I talked with him, all right,” he said, his voice hard and cold. “Asked him for Ketty’s hand, even offered to buy her off of him with what he let me keep from selling my carvings and such.”

  Zeke had made a name for himself—and a fair profit for Mister Barnes—with his unique carving and wood-working skills.

  “Marse Jade, you should’ve seen the look on his face when I pulled out that money—twenty-five dollars cash.” Pride replaced some of the hurt and anger in his voice. “Why, I couldn’t tell if he was gonna laugh at me or set to beating on me. Didn’t make no difference, though. He just throwed the money back in my face, told me to mind my place, not go getting above my station.” Those words from his mouth made my own complaint ring hollow in my ears.

  “What’re you gonna do, then?”

  “Right now,” he said, as he turned Balaam onto Barnes’s clamshell drive, “I’m fixing to rake out a corn crib. I reckon I’ll figure the rest out later.”

  “Your freedom’s a precious gift, Marse Jade,” Zeke said later, as we took a break from the work and lounged atop a bed of dried cobs and straw in the corn crib. “Ain’t nothing you can’t do, nothing you can’t make of yourself if you’s free.”

  The words hung on the still air as he took a puff from his briar pipe, then dissolved on the cloud of smoke he blew from his nostrils.

  “I got it,” Matty yelled as he rounded the corner of the crib. “Look, JD, I got it.”

  He proudly held up a pouch of tobacco and a carved-horn pipe with its cherry-wood stem. I stretched out my right arm, which I’d left out of the sling most of the afternoon, and reached for the pipe.

  “What is you boys up to now?” Zeke asked, the words punctuated by blue clouds.

  “You’re gonna teach us how to smoke,” I said.

  “Is that right?” he asked. “Now, Marse Matty, what your mammy gonna say ’bout that?”

  “She won’t say anything if she don’t know about it,” Matty said. “Oh, c’mon, Zeke, please? We’ll even share some of our store-bought with you.”

  Zeke’s eyes lit up at that. Mister Barnes held back some of the tobacco crop for the slaves to use, but he only used tobacco that he bought out of Virginia or the West Indies. The smoke all smelled the same to me, but I figured the store-bought tobacco must be something special if it came from so far away.

  “Well,” Zeke drawled, “I reckon you boys is just about men.” He swept away corn and straw with one bare foot until he found the dirt floor of the crib, scraped out a shallow hole and dumped the smoking contents of his pipe into it before covering it back up. “Let’s see that tobacco, then.”

  Matty handed the pouch to Zeke, then plopped down beside me. He was a good head shorter than I and still had his baby fat. He was ever trying to impress me, to win my approval—and I hated him.

  I hated him for being rich, while my family barely managed to get by. I hated him for being tied to his mama’s apron strings, while I worked his father’s fields. Mostly, I hated him for being able to be close to Angelina, to see her every day, to be able—as he once admitted to me—to crawl into bed with her for comfort on stormy nights.

  “First, you fill up your bowl like this,” Zeke was saying. Matty obediently dipped the horn bowl into the pouch. “You got any Lucifers?”

  Matty’s victorious expression collapsed.

  “Dadgummit,” he said. “JD, you got any matches on you?”

  “Now, why would I have matches on me?” I said. “I ain’t the one pinched the pipe.”

  “Well, now,” Zeke chided us, “if you boys is gonna become regular smoking gents, you got to carry Lucifers with you. Ain’t fit for proper folk to go about begging for a light. But here,” he said, and pulled a few red-and white-tipped sticks from his bib pocket. “You take some of mine, and just remember the time ol’ Zeke done you a kindness.”

  I accepted the matches while Matty reached out a trembling hand, then pulled it back.

  “I ain’t allowed,” he said.

  “Baby,” I said. “Here, watch this. I seen Bull strike ’em this way.”

  I curled my fingers around the match stem and cocked my thumb so the nail rested on the match t
ip. I struck once with my thumbnail with no effect. The second try gave an encouraging pop, and the third brought the match to life in a hissing rush of flame.

  I howled and flung the match away, then jammed my thumb into my mouth.

  “Look who’s a baby now,” Matty said, and rolled laughing in the straw.

  “Yep, the sulfur’ll get up under your nail if you ain’t real careful ’bout it,” Zeke explained. “Best to let your nail grow out if you want to strike ’em that-a-way. Me,” he added, choosing a match, “I just as soon use my boot heel if I’m wearing ’em. ’Course, a good board’ll always do.”

  He leaned toward the back wall of the crib and struck a match, then curled the flame into the cup of his hand and set it to his pipe. He drew at the flame once, twice and again, then blew out the match with a puff of smoke. He spat in his palm and moistened the tip of the dead match before sticking it headfirst in the dirt.

  “Go on, JD,” Matty urged, handing me the pipe. “Try it again.”

  I mimicked Zeke and leaned toward the wall, then held my breath as I struck the match. It took on the first try, and I drew the flame to the pipe bowl. It seemed against nature to bring the fire so close to my face, but I held the match steady over the tobacco and sucked on the stem until the leaves glowed red and gold.

  “Watch you don’t burn yourself,” Zeke said, a second too late.

  I coughed out a scream and shook away the nearly-consumed match as the flame licked at my fingertips. I shook my hand to cool my fingers, and the not-quite-healed bones protested the abuse.

  “C’mon, JD, let me,” Matty whined.

  I slapped his hands away as I puffed again and again. My eyes watered and I tried to stifle a cough, but it escaped through my nose with a snort and a stream of smoke.

  “Here.” I placed the pipe in eager hands, then fell into a fit of hoarse coughs.

  “That’s fine, now,” Zeke observed as he leaned back against the wall. One hand fiddled with the carved wooden charm he wore about his neck, while the other lazily cupped his pipe. “You boys keep on a-practicing while I catch me a little shuteye.”