I didn’t say anything.
“A mile farther on we parked the car. We had to go on back in the woods on some old—I don’t know if it had been a road at one time. Maybe. It ran along the stream. Then we went up over a hill. And we came on the place. It was somebody’s burial ground, maybe that farmer’s. I don’t know. But there were a lot of gravestones, and a wall, and just beyond the southeast corner of the wall, there was Moses. They hadn’t touched him. I figured that he had thought to take cover behind the wall and someone had taken him from behind. I know, it’s hard to believe anybody could take Moses Washington in the woods, but he hadn’t been in the woods that way for a long time, and he wasn’t a young man anymore, either. And whoever had done it wasn’t a fool; he had tried to make it look like suicide. Smart, as far as it went. The coroner believed it. But nobody who really knew Moses Washington would have believed it, not for a minute. So we put it down as an accident, and your mother collected on the insurance, and—”
“And that’s why you came to his funeral. Because he was your friend but he had the bad sense to get himself killed in an election year, and so you covered it up and let some slack-jawed hillbilly murderer run free. So much for justice.”
He glared at me. “Maybe Moses getting killed, that was justice. Poetic justice, if nothing else. He killed his share.”
“And you were worried about somebody else lynching somebody.”
He didn’t say anything.
“And your precious integrity too, worried about opening a folio, breaching a sacred trust…”
“All right,” he said. “That’s why I came. Out of guilt, like you said.”
“Guilt, hell,” I said. “You just wanted to be sure they got him in the ground so you wouldn’t have to smell the stink. But I’ve got news for you—they never bury anybody that deep.”
He didn’t say anything.
I raised the fragile little teacup to my lips and drained it. I set it down. “I think I’ll be going now,” I said. “Don’t bother to see me out.” I got up and went to the door. I stopped and stood there, just at the edge of the hallway, looking back at him. He wasn’t looking at me, he was hunched close to the fire, and I knew he would be shivering, just as I was. I almost told him then, almost told him the truth. But he had made his own lies. And I had told him about the folio; I had been kind enough for one night.
“What’s going to become of us?” she had said. We were lying in the bedroom, windows closed, heat turned high, lights out.
“There are a couple of incidents that can be used to argue to the contrary,” I said, “but it’s safe to assume we’re going to die. What happens after that is a matter of theology, not history—”
“I’m not talking about history,” she said. “I’m talking about us.”
“Are you implying our romance is less than historical? You don’t think we’re as important as Antony and Cleopatra, or at least the King of England and Wallace Simpson?”
“John,” she said. “I want to talk about this.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh, I can see that.”
“So don’t push it.”
“I’m not.”
“Somebody is.”
“Mother Nature,” she said.
I didn’t say anything for a minute; I was busy thinking. Counting. “You’re not pregnant,” I said.
“Of course not,” she said.
“Then what are you talking about?”
She didn’t say anything for a while, and I lay there listening to her breathing. “I was born in 1948,” she said finally. “I am thirty-one years old and I have been with a man—with you—for five years. We have been living together for three. We get along. We have a lot of problems, but we get along. And I would happily go on forever, but there’s a part of me that wonders if that’s all there’s going to be. Because when a woman is with a man like I am with you… No. I take that back. I suppose it isn’t true for some women. But it’s true for me: I think I would like to have your child.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s frustrating,” she said, “is that you won’t even talk about it. And time is running out.”
“There is plenty of time,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No, there isn’t plenty of time. There’s barely enough.”
“There are tests….”
“Jesus, John” she said. “I’m a doctor. I know about tests. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll wait. I’ll wait until I’m thirty-five, or thirty-six. Or forty. All you have to do is say that it will happen then. But you have to say it now.”
“Why?” I said. “Why now?”
“Because I have to decide if what I want is your child, if what I want is a child. And if what’s important to me is the child, then I have to have time to get away from you and find somebody else, and build a relationship….”
“I don’t know how you can say that,” I said.
“I don’t know how I can’t. What do you want, for me to start forgetting to put the jelly on my diaphragm or something? Then I can come in one day and I will be pregnant. Well, I won’t. Because I don’t intend to raise a child of ours by myself.”
“Right,” I said. “And you couldn’t, could you? Because there wouldn’t be any help from the old folks at home if their daughter turned up with a half-breed baby and a bastard to boot….”
“John,” she said quietly. “Do you hear what you just said?”
“What?”
“You as much as admitted that if I were pregnant, you’d leave me.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Oh, I don’t blame you, in a way,” she said. “I’d leave me too, if I were you and I thought I was trying to do something that devious. But the thing is, it might not be devious. It might be an accident.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t trust me at all.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“You think I don’t,” she said. “You don’t give me enough credit. You think I’ve just decided I love John, and John loves me, so hey, let’s have a baby. You think I’m one of those stupid white bitches who sticks her fingers in between some black man’s fingers and says, What pretty babies we could make. Well, I’m not. I’ve thought a whole lot about just what kind of garbage a child of mine would have to face if his father was a black man. And I don’t like the idea at all. If it turns out I want to have a child and it can’t be with you, I wouldn’t dream of having it be a black man. And I think if you were almost any other black man, I wouldn’t dream of having your child; if I decided I wanted one, I’d just…leave. But I want it to be your child, because I love you, and I think that maybe your child would have a better chance than any man’s child, black or white….”
“Why on earth,” I said, “would you think that?”
“Because you could tell him things. You could explain things to him. He’d have a father who wasn’t afraid of anybody.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“I said ‘anybody,’ not ‘anything,’ ” she said. “You’re not giving me enough credit again.”
“And you still don’t understand. What am I going to do, tell him the glorious story of the black people in America? Well, let me tell you, a lot of it isn’t all that glorious….”
“I know that,” she said. “You think I’ve been listening to your little lectures for five years without knowing that? ‘History itself is atrocious.’ I hear it in my sleep. But I also hear you saying that the problem is not the horror, it’s the lies, the ones they tell and the ones they don’t mention. And our child will know the truth….”
“Lucky him. We’ll give the little spearchucker an African name and a set of rada drums for Christmas. There’s only one thing you’re forgetting.”
“No,” she said, “I’m not forgetting it.” Her voice was suddenly soft, forlorn. “I think about it every time I think about saying all this to you. Because I grew up on stories about my ancestors. An
d yes, those stories made me proud and strong. But there was one story about…well, I’m not even sure he was one of my ancestors. My father always said he was, but he’d claim anybody who was named Powell who had anything to do with Virginia and who did anything halfway illustrious. He claimed a man who was a pianist once, and we almost got sued, because he was no relation at all. And this story was so old, and there are so many Powells in Virginia…. Well, anyway he claimed this man. His name was John Powell. He was a sea captain. His ship was called the Seafoam. When I was a little girl I thought that was just the prettiest name. But my father was more interested in the fact that John Powell came into the James River in 1620, the same year as the Mayflower reached New England. He’d make a big point out of that; he’d sit there by my bed and he’d say, ‘The same year as the Mayflower, Judith, and it could be, a month before.’ He never tried to find out for sure, because he might have found out it was a month after, or maybe even that great-great-however-many-great-grandfather was no relation at all. He didn’t care about the truth; he was too busy being proud. And I was proud too, even though I didn’t know what it meant. But you know, now I think, what if however-many-great-whatever John wasn’t just a sea captain; what if he was a slaver? What if the Seafoam was a slave ship? They all had pretty names, didn’t they?”
“Not all,” I said. “Some. Like Desire. And Jesus.”
“And that’s the trouble,” she said. “You know those things. And I suppose if you found out the Seafoam was a slaver, you’d tell our child that his mother’s ancestors kidnapped his father’s ancestors and chained them and tormented them and sold them into slavery.”
“Well,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. 1620’s a little too early for an Englishman to be a slaver. There isn’t any evidence of English slaving on a large scale until 1660 or so. Oh, it’s possible—the English were in Africa then, and they’d carried some slaves before—but it’s not likely. So probably you folks weren’t slavers, you were just a bunch of salt-of-the-earth tobacco farmers. Probably you didn’t steal us and sell us. Probably you just owned us.”
She hadn’t said anything then, for a long while. But I had been able to hear her breathing harshly in the darkness. “You don’t show anybody any mercy at all, do you?” she had said finally.
The metal of the mailbox was cold and a little damp with the moist air; it stuck to my skin. I pulled the door open and stood there for a long time. Then I took the envelope out of my pocket and dropped it into the chute. I heard it fall. It made a solid strike against bare metal; they had already made the pickup for the day. I wondered if they would pick up again in the morning, or if it would be another day before the letter went out. It didn’t matter; she was going to say the same thing whenever she got it: that I showed no mercy.
I let the door swing shut, wincing as the metal shrieked against the night. I turned away and headed back towards the Hill, thinking as I went that she would be wrong, that I did show mercy, to her if to nobody else. Because all the while she was imagining things about her however-many-great-whatever John, the captain, I could have been telling her the truth about her maybe however-many-great-whatever Thomas, the explorer. Or worse, about his for-certain grandson Joe.
197903110600 (Sunday)
THE STORM HAD ENTERED ITS MIDDLE PHASE. The change had come almost gently; the mass of moisture-laden air had come drifting up from the south, and the snow had begun to fall almost as if by afterthought. But the gentleness was deception. Soon the snow would come driving down. Soon the south wind would blow. But not just now. Just now everything was silent. Just now everything was still. No strong wind came whistling down from the high ridges to stir the branches and rattle the briers. No squirrel chattered. No bird called. The only sound came from the snowflakes drifting down, invisible in the mist, tinkling as they fell like ten thousand tiny bells. It was just about sunup; just before or just after. There was not much light, but enough to see that more light would not have done any good; the air was full of fog and falling snow, and it was all too thick for any real vision. I could easily have been lost, for all the landmarks were shifted and changed by the grayness. But I was not lost; a hunter is never lost so long as there is a track to follow. And, amid all the grayness and all the quiet, the tracks were there, sharp and bright and clear and plain and crisp as cracking ice.
I sat on my heels and studied them. They were fresh, of course—the snow was falling fast enough to obliterate a trail in minutes; I would have to follow swiftly, or lose the spoor. But I did not hurry. Because it is patience, not impulse, that follows tracks; it is knowledge, not haste, that saves time.
In three minutes I knew what the tracks had to tell me. I knew he was a male, because of the way he dragged his feet; a female would have pranced more, stepped more precisely. I knew he was not large, perhaps ninety pounds, and I knew he was alone, which made him young; not a yearling, but no more than two or three. And I knew, too, that I had a chance to catch him, depending on what he did and on how well I remembered old lessons. Not a good chance, but a chance.
I stood up and invested a few minutes in stretching. It had been a long night—I had covered forty miles since sundown—and now my muscles were cramping and my mind was as gray as the forest around me. I could not afford either. Cramped muscles make for jerky, unnatural motion which in turn makes for abrupt, unnatural sounds; the kinds of sounds that alert any game. And a tired mind makes for mistakes that, with a gun in hand, can be fatal. So I stood up carefully and massaged my shoulders and arms and especially my legs, and washed my face with snow. In a few seconds I felt wide awake, although my hands were cold—almost numb. The alertness was temporary; the numbness was not. But for the time being I would be all right. I shrugged into my pack, retrieved my rifle from where it rested against a tree, and checked the safety and then the bore, to be sure I had not somehow clogged it. Then I loaded. And then I started off after him.
He was headed south, moving nose-to-wind as they almost always do, along an old game trail etched into the mountainside a hundred yards below the ridge. I moved along behind him, sticking to the trail, not only because the going was easier there, but also because that trail had been a whitetail highway for as long as I could remember; if he heard my movements coming from that direction, he would think I was another deer. I was dressed properly, in cotton and in wool, so that the sounds my clothes made against the brush were soft and natural; I was not overly worried about noise. I was worried about the wind. There wasn’t any to speak of—just a light northward drift—and that meant I was at the mercy of chance. Wind, even a strong wind, is not a constant in the hills; the pattern of the land, the presence of water or bare rock, any one of half a hundred things, can set up minor eddies of the air which, unopposed by strong currents caused by weather or sun, could go almost anywhere. One of these could carry a ravel of my scent to him. And then he would be gone.
But if the relative stillness of the air worked against me, the storm, at least, was with me. It deadened hearing and obscured vision, but he was the one that most needed to hear and see. And the snowfall provided a constant gauge of my progress; after twenty minutes of trailing I knew that I would catch him: the tracks were getting fresher.
By then I knew even more about him. I knew he was a little larger than I had thought, because when he went through higher drifts his chest caught on the snow, turning his trail into a trough. That meant he was older; definitely a three-year-old. He was smart too; he had read the weather, had felt the air moving in from the south, and had known—as I had—that here at last was the big storm that had been threatening. And now he sensed—as I sensed—that this storm would not sweep through, but would stall and hang over us, dumping its entire load of moisture before its air became light enough for it to float away over the mountains. Then there would be hell to pay. Then the temperature would fall and the winds would come driving out of the west, whipping the snow into monster drifts. He sensed that, as I did, and so, even though he had left off
his feeding in order to go in search of shelter, he was stopping now and then to browse, storing up against what could be a long fast. That helped me make up ground, of course. But it wasn’t certain that that would do me any good, because I also knew from his tracks that he was, like most of his kind (at least those who reach advanced age), a paranoid. There were times when he would stop, not to browse, but to wait in heavy cover, looking over his backtrail. The odds were he would hear me or scent me long before I could detect him. I would come up on him, but I would probably not get a shot.
But I followed along anyway, trying to be quiet, trying to listen for the little tattletales that can give things away—the chirp of a bird, the chatter of a squirrel. But mostly I concentrated on my breathing, on keeping it even and slow and deep and quiet, because the panting of a man is a sound unlike any other, and it can be heard a long, long way. And it was hard not to pant. Not because I was moving so swiftly; because I was excited.
For I was coming up on him, bit by bit. Every step brought me closer—that excited me. But what excited me even more was that with every step I was getting better. The old knowledge was coming back, the old tracking sense, the feel for which way a branch would spring, for where, below the snow, lay rock or clear ground. I began to feel the heat running in my veins. Not blood lust; trail lust. I was getting good, and I was getting close. And then, suddenly, he left the game trail and moved up towards the crest of the ridge. I stopped dead.
I didn’t know why he had done that. It could have been something done out of habit—deer are creatures of habit—but it could have been something else. There was not a lot of time to consider; I moved on up the trail, crouching low, acting on the assumption that he had gone up there towards the ridge so that he would have a good vantage from which to examine his backtrail. It was not a familiar tactic, but it could be effective; perhaps he had learned it at the hoof of some venerable stag, just as I had learned at the foot of Old Jack. The fact that he had used it did not have to mean anything—he could simply be being cautious before heading into some protected bedding ground. But I thought not. I thought I knew what was happening: he was aware of me.
Chaneysville Incident Page 31