Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  It was all there now—pictures, telegram, the flag with which they had covered his casket, the notes of condolence from the local politicos, the congressman, the senators, the commandant, the President, the citation for conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty, the Medal of Honor itself. All the materials any historian worth his hire would need to write a glowing preface to the biography of a Great American, a war hero who had gone on to play professional sports, perhaps, and then run for Congress…. That was just one of those stories that would never be. But it was nice to think about what might have been, and so I stood there looking at his pictures until I couldn’t stand any more, and then I went upstairs.

  I went up the front stairs, the ones that Moses Washington had cleared with such silent fury. They were still clear and so I passed quickly up and into the bedroom Bill and I had shared until the day he, grinning proudly because he had just passed his driver’s test, had driven me down to catch the bus so that I could go to college. That had been a special day for both of us; she had treated it as business as usual, getting up and making breakfast and going off to work, the fact that she went on foot so that we could use the car being her only acknowledgment of my departure.

  Bill had helped me wrestle my suitcase and trunk down the stairs and load them into the car, and had driven me down to the Alliquippa, where I would catch the local bus. He had parked by the curb, not ten feet from Old Jack’s shoeshine stand. I had got out of the car and gone over to talk.

  But Old Jack was not talking to me. He had not spoken to me in three months, not since the night I had gone over to the far side to tell him that I had won a scholarship, that I was going away to college. He had said nothing for a long time, and then he had exploded. He had cursed me roundly, claiming that in all the years he had shown me things I had never learned anything, that I was going away to ruin my eyes and my brain with books. When that had failed to change my mind he had got up and made himself a toddy and sat down and drank it in stony silence, without even looking at me.

  That was the last time I had gone to the far side. In truth, I had not missed it. I had been too busy, working at two different jobs, one as a busboy, one as a cook—the scholarship was generous but not lavish—and, in whatever time was left, trying to read the things that I believed, erroneously, my soon-to-be classmates would have cut their intellectual teeth on. Since then I had seen him, but I had said nothing to him; it was the way he wanted it. But now I was leaving, and I wanted to say goodbye. And so I had got out of the car and gone over to him.

  He turned to me and smiled, and for a minute I thought that he was ready to forgive me. But then I noticed that the smile was too wide, showed too much tooth. “Yassuh,” he said. “You want a shine, suh?” It was what he had always called his “white folks” voice.

  “Jack,” I said.

  “Yassuh,” he said. “That’s ma name. You climb right on up here, young suh, an’ I’ll give you a shine that’ll make them city boys set up an’ take notice. You goin’ off to be a white man, you best learn how white folks act.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Course,” he said, “I ’spect you already know. I ’spect that woman’s been teachin’ you how to flip your coattails ’fore you set down like a Goddamned sissy. An’ I bet you learned it real good; you always had a taste for that kinda thing, like a hound dog that’s tasted chicken blood. Ain’t good for nothin’ after that. Don’t want to hunt, jest wants to kill chickens.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I see you had your name in the paper,” he said. “I seen the picture, an’ I asted somebody, an’ they told me what it said in there. You know somethin’, Johnny—’scuse me, I mean Mistuh Washington, suh—these white folks, ones wouldn’t give you the time a day last year? Now they think you’re somethin’. Course, they ain’t ’xactly sure what, an’ I ’spect as how they’re jest as pleased you ain’t gonna be around here makin’ ’em try an’ figger out what, but they sure do think you’re somethin’. Why, you know, the mayor hisself set up here an’ tole me you was a credit to your race. Yes indeedy, that’s jest ’xactly what he said. Course, I didn’t correct him, an’ tell him that you wasn’t colored no more, on accounta you read enough a them damn books to turn your head clear white….” And then he stopped. Because I had climbed up on the stand and sat on the bench and put my feet up on the supports.

  He sat there on his stool looking up at me, his eyes soft and pained-looking. I nodded at my feet. He kept on looking at me. I nodded again, a short, quick nod, as cold and imperious as I could make it. He reached for the polish, taking up the can slowly, slowly dipping his hands into it, slowly bringing them out. He hesitated then, holding his polish-laden hands over my shoes, and he looked up at me. I nodded again. And then he shined my shoes.

  When he was finished I got down and paid him, giving him a dollar and turning away before he could offer change. I went back to the car and sat there in silence. Bill didn’t say anything either, not until the bus had come sighing in and we had got out and I had thoroughly annoyed the aging bus driver by insisting that it was his job to help me get the trunk into the luggage compartment, not Bill’s. Then, after the driver had gone into the hotel to see if there were any packages, Bill looked at me and said, “I pity them.”

  “Pity who?” I said.

  “Those people where you’re going. I bet they took one look at that application and they saw all those nice tame things you did, and they looked at your picture and saw a neat, clean-cut colored boy, and that’s what they think they’re getting, a nice, gentle, shy Negro, won’t be a bit of trouble. Only one day those people are gonna find out how dangerous it is to fool with somebody who doesn’t know how to do anything but go for the throat.”

  I didn’t say anything. But I looked at Old Jack, sitting on his stool, his hands still black with polish, still not looking at me but instead staring east, down Forbes Road, where the bus was going to go. I wanted to move then. Wanted to go over and just speak to him, say I’m sorry, or I didn’t mean it, or maybe just goodbye. But of course I didn’t do that. And he would have been upset if I had; that was the kind of weak display reserved for women and preachers and piano teachers. And so I just stood there, watching him looking down the road I was going to travel, until the driver came out and took the oneway ticket I had purchased the day that they had informed me about the scholarship, and then I climbed on the bus. I had found a seat on the right-hand side, where I could see them, and as the bus pulled away I had waved my hand. But the angle was wrong. The glass was tinted. I doubt that either of them saw.

  In the bedroom, my mother had pressed her attack in the usual manner, overrunning the bed that had been Bill’s with six months’ worth of issues of the local paper. But she had retreated in other quadrants; she had cleared off my bed and my dresser and, as I saw when I opened the closet, she had removed whatever trash she had piled in front of my old clothes. There were not many of them, but there were enough; I had never really moved out. Before Bill died I had lived there. After he was buried, I had never come back.

  I closed the closet door and stripped off my clothes, becoming conscious for the first time of the smells that were attached to them: smoke, sweat, dying. Suddenly the aromas were not only noticeable but powerful, so powerful they made me feel sick. My skin was crawling suddenly, as if I were infested by some kind of bug, and I wanted to shower badly.

  And so I went back into the bathroom and climbed into the stall and let the hot water cascade over me and wash away the stink, and then I dried myself and went and crawled beneath the sheets and closed my eyes. Thoughts did not come, but pictures did, little flashes across my mind: Old Jack’s hands guiding mine as he taught me to aim a rifle; Bill’s face twisted with effort as he tried to lift his barbells; my mother bent over her ancient black Singer sewing machine, the glow from the built-in light bouncing off the maple cabinet and reflecting off the maple-colored skin of her face, sparkling on the row of pins she held betw
een her tightly compressed lips; the muscles of Moses Washington’s back rippling as he swung the double-edged ax against the trunk of the oak tree that had had the poor judgment to grow where he wanted to walk; and, in a weird skein of imagining, a vision of myself seated at a table, beside a kerosene lamp, with an ancient-looking book in front of me. The scene was no mystery, although I had never looked at it from that vantage; I knew where it was. Above me. Upstairs. In the attic. The place Moses Washington had taken as his own.

  The attic was reached by a trapdoor set into the ceiling in the far corner of the bedroom Moses Washington had kept for his own, sleeping there on occasions when he and his wife were not seeing eye to eye. It made sense to place the trapdoor there, since nobody went up into the attic except Moses Washington. Nobody would have been welcome. Nobody wanted to be welcome. Bill and I had often speculated about exactly what he did up there, but we weren’t crazy enough to go and see, or even to ask, not even when we were very small. So all we ever knew was that every day he would climb up there and pull the staircase and the trapdoor up after him. You could hear him rattle around for a while, and then the floor would creak as he would settle down to do whatever it was he did. There was no set time for all this; sometimes he would not make the ascent until after dinner, and we would hear him moving around until we drifted off to sleep. There were times when I had wakened in the middle of the night and heard him pacing. He could go up after breakfast, and if he did we would very often not see him for the rest of the day. And if he did come down, it was well to be out of sight, because his actions were totally unpredictable. Usually he would pursue one of his insane projects, truck gardening or stonemasonry—he had, by the time he died, managed to build a stone wall around every tree and hedge in the back yard. But sometimes he would break even that bizarre pattern. Once he had descended and grabbed me by the hand and dragged me down the stairs and out the back door and on a long and exhausting and silent tour of the Hill, hauling me by the hand up one street and down another, again and again, for two solid hours, without saying a single word, and when he was finished with whatever it was he was doing he had picked me up and kissed me wetly, and there had been tears in his eyes. Another time, shortly before he died, he had come down slowly and heavily and had stood above me as I sat reading a book. I had tried to look up at him, but he had put his hand on my head and forced me to look at my book, and we had stayed like that, a tableau in tension, until, for reasons known only to him, he had let me go. I had turned to look at him then, and had found that I could not look away; his eyes met mine and held my gaze more firmly than his hands had held my head. We had stayed that way for a while, and then he had turned and gone back upstairs.

  Those were not the only such occasions; far from it. For as time went by, it seemed that the occasions when he would come storming—or not always storming; sometimes he would come down slowly and thoughtfully—down from the attic and go out and do something aberrant and frightening became more and more frequent. In fact, it was probably not surprising that he had taken up his gun and gone out and covered twenty miles of countryside and still been wild and reckless enough to trip over a root or something and kill himself, because before he had done that he had been up there. At any rate, we knew that whatever he had been doing up there was bizarre and probably unfathomable and almost certainly crazy-making, and so the attic had remained pretty much a mystery until the day that I had decided that I was going to go up there and get one of Moses Washington’s books.

  It had been a day like this day, early in spring and a fresh snow on the ground, cold and nasty as only Appalachian spring days can be. I had been getting over one of my perennial bouts with the flu—I was still coughing up great vile clots of green mucus tinged with the blood from nosebleeds—but I was not hurting anywhere, and I only ran a fever in the afternoon. And so my mother had left a pitcher of water by the bed and a pot of soup on the stove and had gone to work. At noon, after I finished reading Huckleberry Finn for the ninth time, I had got out of bed and gone down and had my soup. I had felt quite well then—too well to go back to bed. So I washed my bowl and went wandering in a vague search for new reading material, although I had read everything in the house at least once, including my mother’s Missionary Society magazines and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. But I looked anyway, and somehow, in the midst of that fruitless wandering, it came to me to go up into the attic and get one of Moses Washington’s books.

  I was thirteen then; Moses Washington had been dead for three years. Yet in all that time, I had not thought to venture up into his stronghold. Bill had; once the funeral was over he had made it his business, the first time my mother had turned her back, to take a flashlight and go exploring. He had come back to report, in tones of disappointment and disgust, that there was nothing up there but a mess of old papers and books. For him the matter had ended there, and for me it had too, although it shouldn’t have—that “mess” of things to read should have put me in mind of Paradise, and knowing about it should have galvanized me into action. But for some reason—possibly because of my memories of the strange states in which Moses Washington had emerged from there—I had stayed away. My mother had stayed away too; she had pushed her pickets into every cranny of the lower part of the house, but she had not attempted to storm the high ground. Bill, in his exploration, had touched nothing. And so the attic was the same on the day I had determined to enter it as it had been on that bright hot August morning when Moses Washington had left it to go prowling through the South County, carrying a gun for the first time in a decade. And when I, armed with a flashlight, mounted the steep, folded-down stairway and emerged into the upper darkness, I was almost going back in time, and when I thumbed the switch on the flashlight and sent a cone of weak light on a handmade chair and a large, roughly carpentered table on which sat an open book and a kerosene lamp, I was looking at a perfect memory; dusty, but perfect. It was almost as if the chair, the table, the book, the lamp, the empty fireplace, were items under glass; they were the keys to a man’s mind, laid bare to me, clues to a mystery, the answer to every question there. All I had to do was interpret them. It was the greatest thrill I had ever known.

  I did not, of course, know what I was about. And so, without even suspecting the danger, I fell prey to one of the greatest fallacies that surrounds the study of the past: the notion that there is such a thing as a detached researcher, that it is possible to discover and analyze and interpret without getting caught up and swept away. I believed, being a naive thirteen-year-old, that I was going to climb up into that attic and look at a few heirlooms and some dusty mementos and figure Moses Washington out, and once that was done, I was going to climb back down and go on about my merry way, unaffected, unchanged, unharmed. And so I moved with an arrogance and fearlessness born of nothing but ignorance. But at least I realized that what I was looking at was perfect, and that anything I did, one false step, would destroy that perfection, would probably obscure whatever message might be in the scene.

  And so I stood at the head of the stairway for many minutes, looking at it—fixing it in my mind—before I walked across the loosely laid floor of two-by-six planks to the table, and looked down at the book lying on it. It was a Bible. Beside the Bible stood the lamp, and I could see that there was still some kerosene pooled in the reservoir. Beside the lamp was a small box of matches. I looked at those things for a long time, trying to understand why the matches were there, in the open, not put away. For I knew the way in which those men’s minds had worked: put things back when you are finished with them; put them in the same place every time, so that when you need them you won’t have to guess or fumble or even think. And then I realized that I had made an incorrect assumption (although I did not think of it in those terms). I had assumed that I was stepping into the scene at the middle of a cycle, when in fact, I was stepping into the beginning of one. They were beside the lamp because that was where he would want them when he first came in—to light the lamp. Then he would put them so
mewhere out of the way. His last act before blowing out the lamp and leaving would have been to take them out again and place them where he could find them easily, in the dark. I stood there feeling the flush of pride and power that comes from having been able to figure something out; pride and a surge of confidence. And so I reached out with a steady hand and removed a match from the box and struck it, and then I lit the lamp. Then I reached out to drop the match into the can that I knew (because Old Jack’s description of Moses Washington’s ways had extended even to the way he snuffed matches) he would have kept there half full of sand.