In the days that followed I had spent every spare minute studying the physics of sound, studying harder than I had when I had needed to pass an exam. But it made no difference. For when the west wind blew, I heard it singing. And so I had done what I had to do; I had gone away from the mountains, down to the flat land, where there were no irregularities of surface. And I had promised myself I would never hear it again, that I would never go up into the mountains again. I had kept that promise, until now. Only now I knew where the lie had been: I had stopped hearing, but I had not stopped listening.
It was cold in the cabin; I could not recall its ever being as cold there—or anywhere—before. It was the wind that made it cold, not only stabbing through every crack in the walls but slicing over the top of the chimney, creating a fearsome draft, making the fire burn strongly but without heat, making it give off nothing but a hard, cold, fierce, unholy light.
I saw Judith leave the stove—not Judith, really, just the shadow of her, moving against the glow of the stove. She set a steaming cup on the table before me. I did not need to taste it, or even smell it, to know what it was: coffee. I did not want coffee. I wanted a toddy. I needed one. But I could not expect Judith to understand that. There was a lot that I needed that she would never understand. For she was a woman and she was white, and though I loved her there were points of reference that we did not share. And never would.
We had come back easily, more easily than I would have thought possible. We had to struggle down from the hillside and out to the main road, but when we got there we found that it had been plowed and cindered, and within half a mile of walking we were offered a ride in a battered red GMC pickup by an aging farmer with a ruddy, weather-beaten face. He said little to us, only asking if we wanted a ride and how far we were going, and sharing his opinion on the timing of the inevitable shift in the wind. He dropped us at the base of the mountain, and we had made our way up. The sun was high then, and shining on that slope, and the air was cold but still; we made the climb in half an hour, and brought the car down in just a little more, slowed only by an occasional deep drift and the fact that we were going in reverse.
I bought gas in Rainsburg, and we made good time from there. I stayed in the valley, coming north through Charlesville and Beegletown, swinging west at the Narrows, tooling slowly through the Town. I expected to have to climb the Hill on foot since it was rarely—if ever—plowed, but when we got there I saw the Town’s road-grader coming down; Randall Scott was an honest politician—he stayed scared.
The cabin was cold, but not as cold as I had feared it would be; there were still coals glowing in the grate. I built a tinder fire on top of them to force a draft. In half an hour the heat was coming up well, and the frost no longer blossomed before our faces. By then I had made tea, and we drank it loaded with sugar, and I heated stew and fried venison steaks, and we wolfed them down. Then I loaded the stove with wood to burn while we slept. By the time I finished, Judith was already lying down, huddled under the blankets. But she wasn’t sleeping—her breathing was too regular for that. I mixed myself a toddy and stood by the stove. When I had drunk it all I went to lie beside her; she moved quickly to make room. Then we lay there, listening to the fire roaring in the chimney.
“John?” she said after a while.
“What?”
“Are you going to tell me anything?”
“I’m not sure I can,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Tell me what you want to know,” I said.
“I want to know who the hell is buried down there,” she said.
“Oh. That. Slaves are buried down there. Runaway slaves. A subject of a local legend; not much of one. No heroes doing great deeds. Nobody much has even bothered to write it down, except for one local historian, and we know about local historians….”
“John.”
“A group of slaves came north on the Underground Railroad. They got across the Line all right, into what they probably thought was free territory. Only there wasn’t any such thing. And so they were about to be captured and taken back. But they decided they’d rather die. Some kind soul in the South County did it for them. Anyway, that’s the legend.”
“And you think those are the people buried down there?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you think it has something to do with your…with Moses Washington.”
“Sure,” I said. “You know, it’s really amazing when you think about it. I mean, mathematically it’s perfectly possible, but for a man to take a mathematical possibility and turn it into reality…it’s amazing. I don’t know whether you’d call it obsession or dedication, but it surely is amazing.”
“John,” she said. “Will you please slow down and talk to me? What is amazing?”
“Moses Washington’s search. He started it when he was sixteen years old. He dedicated his life to it. That’s easy to say, but you can’t understand it until you sit down and figure out how he must have found those graves. He wouldn’t have known they were there, or even what he was looking for. And so he would have had to look everywhere for something. And he would have known, before he was twenty years old, that he was going to have to do it that way and he would have had to accept, at twenty, the possibility that he was going to end up looking at every square yard of this County, on foot. And he would have had to accept the fact, at twenty, that he wasn’t going to be finished until he was…I don’t know. The odds would make it at least forty-five. And so he would have had to set up a plan, a pattern, that he was going to follow for a quarter of a century, longer than he’d been alive. It was perfectly possible; there’s about a thousand square miles of County, and he could have eliminated some of it—plowed fields, rivers, towns, so forth—but even if there were a thousand square miles, he could have searched a square mile a week, which isn’t much. But it would take twenty-five years. And it took longer. It took him thirty-five years, even though he naturally prowled the County most of the time. So by then he must have actually searched most of the County. Maybe all of it; maybe he missed them the first time, not knowing what he was looking for—”
“Missed the graves,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But how did he know that that was what he was looking for? When he found it, I mean. And how was it—”
“He knew because there were only twelve runaway slaves. That’s what the legend says. Well, it says a dozen, which could be taken as an approximation, but could be dead accurate. And he knew the legend; it was one of his favorites.”
“But there are thirteen graves,” she said.
“That’s how he knew he’d found him.”
“Found who? You mean…C.K.?”
“Yes,” I said. “C.K.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Thirty-five years,” I said.
“Why thirty-five?” she said. “He died in 1958, right?”
“He found them in 1942,” I said. “He would have found them in the fall or early winter, because the ground would have had to be clear. Or maybe he found them in the spring or summer and took the time deciding what to do.”
“What did he do?”
“He joined the army,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“You know,” I said, “it’s funny. You spend years fiddling around with facts, trying to put them in the right places, trying to explain them with each other, and maybe you come pretty close, and everything fits except maybe one or two things, and that’s usually because you’ve made a mistake right from the very beginning, overlooked something so obvious that when it finally dawns on you you just want to cry. I spent the better part of fifteen years wondering what happened to him in the army that made him change. I guess it seemed reasonable to assume that was where it had happened; everybody knows war changes men—that’s why they keep having them. But the war didn’t change Moses Washington. He would have had to change before he would go to war. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. M
oses Washington, fifty-two years old, volunteers, hell, bribes his way into a white man’s army, a segregated army, to fight a white man’s war; he would have had to change in order to do that, or have had a pretty strong reason.”
“So you think he found the graves before that, and that’s what changed him?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he changed at all. I think he went to war for the same reason he married my mother when he came out, for the same reason he did everything else: to get himself ready to find C.K. Washington.”
“But he’d found him.”
“No,” I said. “He’d found his grave.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I know,” I said. “It sounds like the same thing. That’s what I thought too; that’s the way historians think. I assumed that if Moses Washington went looking for his grandfather he’d really be looking for signs of his grandfather: records, old campsites, markers, graves, maybe even a skeleton. And he was. So I assumed that he was acting just like a historian, and when he found whatever it was, he’d set up a marker or something, and that would be it. But I forgot that Moses Washington wasn’t a historian, any more than he was a moonshiner or a real estate speculator. If he was anything, he was a hunter. And he did what any good hunter does when he’s going off to trail dangerous game: he left trail markers, so that if somebody wanted to they could follow him, and he more or less made sure somebody would want to….”
“You’re talking about you, aren’t you?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “So he was a hunter, and he left a trail for you to follow. But what was the point of it if he’d already found the grave?”
“He wasn’t looking for a grave,” I said. “He was looking for a man. That’s what he was looking for all along: a man. He knew when he came here that C.K. Washington was dead; if he wasn’t he would have been a hundred years old. So he was looking for his grave or a skeleton or whatever the same way a hunter looks for a hoofprint, or bedding grounds, or signs of feeding or droppings—it was a spoor. And when he found it he did what any good woodsman would do: he put himself into the mind of the game and headed off after it.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying that because C.K. Washington died there Moses Washington committed suicide there?”
“No,” I said. “Not suicide. I was wrong about that. We were all wrong. Everybody thought it was an accident. The Judge thought it was murder. I thought I had discovered it was suicide. But what it really was was a…a hunting trip. That’s where he said he was going. That’s what he told his wife, and that’s what he told Old Jack: he was going hunting. And that’s what he did.”
“That sounds…crazy,” she said. “You’re talking about a man chasing after ghosts.”
“No,” I said. “Ghost isn’t the right word. Ghost is a word that was invented by people who didn’t believe, like the names the Spaniards gave the Aztec gods. Ancestors is a better term, or—”
“I don’t care what you call it. It’s insane.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I guess maybe that’s what insanity is, somebody believing in something that doesn’t have any kind of reality for you. Napoleon’s dead; anybody who thinks he’s Napoleon is crazy. There are no ghosts; anybody who chases ghosts is crazy. The thing is, if you accept his premises, everything he did was perfectly logical. He wanted to understand dying, to look before he leaped, so he went to war. He was a hero, because he wanted to take chances, get closer to dying. He loved a woman because C.K. had loved a woman, maybe two, and Moses Washington needed to understand that. He had a son because C.K. Washington had had a son….”
“Moses Washington had two sons,” she said, “and it’s still crazy.”
“Only if you’re a Christian. Only if you believe in heaven and hell, and all those things. Moses Washington didn’t; the old ladies always said he was a heathen, and he was—he spent all that time in the church and talking to preachers and reading the Bible because he wanted to be sure the Christians were wrong. You don’t throw your whole life away if you’re not sure that the dead really are there, waiting for you.”
“That’s not crazy,” she said. “That’s the Goddamned Twilight Zone.”
I didn’t say anything.
She raised up and looked at me; I could feel her eyes on me. “You don’t think so, do you?” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“No,” she said. “You don’t. You not only think he did that, you think it was a perfectly sane and sensible thing to do, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
She lay back down. “Dear God,” she said.
We lay there for a while, listening to the fire, to the first low hummings as the west wind began its song.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s over now. You know what happened to Moses Washington, and all that—”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to C.K., and that means I don’t really know anything. I just know what Moses Washington knew when he got this far.”
“Oh, great,” she said. “So what does that mean? You’re going to put on your little Dan’l Boone costume and take your little rifle down there and blow your brains out so you can go hunting with the old men, and sit around the campfìre drinking whiskey and telling lies—”
“I’m going to sleep,” I said.
We lay there for a while, not talking, not touching. The song grew louder. I tried not to listen.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Then hold me?” she said. “Please?”
I twisted around to face her, put my arms around her, felt her breath on my face, feeling the chill in it.
“Don’t go away,” she said. “Please.”
“I won’t,” I said.
But I had gone away. When her breathing became slow and even, punctuated by the little catches and hesitations that, in her, meant deepest sleep, I slipped away from her, and went to sit at the table, staring into the darkness, listening to songs the wind sang as it fluted through the hills. I don’t know how long I sat there; a long time. Long enough for the fire to burn low, its substance leeched away by the wailing wind. Long enough for the chill to come and set me shivering. I closed my eyes then, trying to escape the cold, knowing, as I did it, that it would not do any good. And then I heard her moving, getting up and going to the stove. I had opened my eyes and had seen her shadow moving, coming to me, bringing me coffee.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Drink it,” she said.
“I don’t want coffee….” I caught the aroma then: strong, sweet, heady. A toddy. She had made me a toddy. I took the cup and sipped at it, once, twice. Then I drank it down, almost in a gulp, feeling the warmth spread through me. I closed my eyes. She came and took the cup from me and filled it again and brought it back, held it out to me. “Why?” I said.
“Faith,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I know,” she said. “You don’t think I understand. You’re right; I don’t understand. But I can believe in you; I do believe in you. If you want to take that gun and blow your head off, I won’t try to stop you; I don’t know that I can help you, but I won’t try to stop you. And I’ll try to understand. And if you say you need something that I can’t give you, something you need a toddy to get, then I’ll make a toddy for you.”
I wished the lamp were going so that I could see her face, but I could not, so I just reached out and took the cup from her hands and drank. She came and stood beside me, her hand on my shoulder, waiting while I finished. When I set the cup down she went to the stove and began to mix another. “You still hate him, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s what it is, you know,” she said. “You
hate him. You’ve hated him all along. You keep saying you made mistakes, or you didn’t understand. That’s true, I guess; I wouldn’t really know. But I do know why you made all those mistakes. You were too busy hating him to really see him. It took you how long to figure out he killed himself? But you should have known. All the facts were there—”
“They covered them up,” I said.
“ ‘I study history because I want to know where the lies are.’ That’s what you told me. So now I’m supposed to believe you swallowed the biggest lie of all.”
“How was I supposed to know?”
“ ‘Why not study atrocities? History itself is atrocious.’ You told me that too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You know,” she said, “you have to wonder. Here you are, hot-stuff historian, superscholar, able to leap to conclusions in a single bound, and half the people who know you think you’re brilliant and the other half think you’re crazy, but everybody agrees there’s something special about you, even if they don’t understand what the hell it is. You can make a bonfire by rubbing two dry facts together, so long as you’re talking about the Punic Wars and Saint Francis of Assisi, or the Lost Chord and Jesus Christ. But let you come within twenty miles of where you live and it all goes out the window. Because you don’t really want to know, John. You want to win. You want to beat Moses Washington and whatever—”
Chaneysville Incident Page 49