The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  Now the birds came to her more and more. She looked around at the women and the gaunt sickly children of Rising Souls, and she thought of small things twitching in a net.

  Three

  A lean and bitter year, 1892.

  While elsewhere electricity coursed for the first time through homes and lampposts and the bodies of criminals, the people at Rising Souls burned through the last of their kerosene before the end of the fall. Pine-knots and pitch in winter. When the revelation was near, and the Teacher retreated into his cottage with the girl and a few chosen, their accumulated stores were near depleted and their funds long gone. What crops they’d planted—white corn, sweet potatoes—couldn’t support them. Neda led parties of them to claw oysters at low tide or into the woods to scratch with makeshift hoes for wild roots. And some snuck out to beg at the fishing camps, where the wives of fishermen away gave them sides of smoked mullet, Neda meanwhile learning paths and disused roads and cattle traces so that she could cover miles of ground in darkness. Finally the Teacher barred all such travel and intercourse, as he called it, with the outside. But Neda kept going until she was caught, having made the mistake of sharing her fish with a toothy girl from Alabama who, after she’d eaten her piece to the bone, went and told.

  Next morning the Teacher had the women assemble before the cottage, and in the dawning light they whipped Neda’s legs with green cane-stalks until she bled. The girl she loved, by now heavy-bellied like she’d been when they first met, tottered as she stooped and swung but didn’t fail to draw blood.

  Neda, eyes shut, raised her head to the sky.

  Isaac too had taken to wandering at night. He would wake and slip from between the rickets-bent bodies of other children and pad out of the bunkhouse, walking until the soles of his feet were numb from the cold. Beneath his feet, in the ground, reptiles and frogs slept, their lives infinitesimally slowed. His own small life slowing with every passing day. On these nights he encountered whirring clouds of insects and the bats that broke like shards of the dark itself out of the night sky to feed on them. He often confused his waking life and dreams: The low, smooth movement of a shadow spilling down the bank of the creek, a panther come to drink; flicking the liver-colored cup of its tongue, the panther eyed him for a moment and then spilled back up the way it came. And it was on one such night that he saw or dreamed he saw the Teacher carrying something small and wrapped in cloth out to the little clearing in the woods behind the cottage. Saw or dreamed he saw the Teacher fall to his knees and set the bundle down and start digging in the dirt. Clawing with his big hands. From behind a screen of saw palmetto, Isaac watched the Teacher dig, heard his mumbled prayers and curses, until suddenly the man stood up and looked his way. Then Isaac was running, holding his breath all the way back to the bunkhouse. He wouldn’t be caught, and the memory of this event would not survive in full. It would pass, like the dead half sister whose burial he’d witnessed, into other forms: a turtle floundering in a dry creekbed, a horse-trampled fox panting at the roadside, the memory of helpless things, a sadness he could not explain even when he had the words to do so.

  That May they watched the river sink, the beginnings of a drought that would wither northwest Florida and lower Georgia on through summer. The air was dusty and tinged with the smoke of distant wildfires. Daylight chased the children into spots of shade, where they watched their mothers shuffle by. Legs like bones made visible by the light blazing through their thin shifts and dresses. Hauling buckets of water that grew lighter day by day. Hauling skeletal branches of wood. Hauling each other, growing light and bony themselves.

  The first time Isaac drowned he was kneeling at the spring-fed pool, gulping the brassy water he knew it was forbidden to drink and that if anyone caught him he would be punished even as he retched it up. Then he was empty and drifting facedown in the pool, the fibers of his ragged clothes swelling thirstily as the water sucked him under.

  Through the bubbles of his last breaths shot a desperate clawed hand that snatched him by the collar, wrenched him up. Out of the gray falling world and into the light. When he came to, he found himself caught in a fierce embrace; lights swam before his eyes and he couldn’t see who held him, who clapped his back so that his chin jolted at their sharp shoulder.

  Neda felt the sudden hitch in the boy’s stomach and then the rush of water running down her back, warmed by its time inside him. Lately she’d been following the boy, carrying him now and then, watching, for she could no longer stand the sight of his mother. During the night of the dead child’s birth, which was in fact the third day of labor, when one of the empty-eyed women who’d been midwifing came and asked her to help, Neda told the girl for the last time that she loved her. Whispered to her in her pain. Told her that her baby was dead. But there was nothing there in the girl’s eyes. She might have said it to a stone. And so she’d left the girl and the dead child to the roomful of thin keening women, passing on the stairs the Teacher, whose face for the first time wore some hint that his control was waning, a glint of fear.

  Now holding this child who she’d helped bring into the world and like all of them was dying, she knew what she would do. She held Isaac out at arm’s length and studied him, how he favored his mother who no longer cared for him or for Neda, and, she admitted now, never had at all. The further we are from love, the more we see it remembered, traced, in the other things. She would take him, tonight or the night after. These green eyes blinking, the mouth that has air only because of you. She would go. Love had brought her there and, now, love would lead her out.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Not long after the disappearance of Neda and the boy, the end came for Rising Souls. Brought on not by anyone’s god, but by a team of workmen from Tallahassee who rode down the sand path in a pair of oxcarts loaded with tools and fresh pinewood caskets. The workmen had been hired by a group of Northeasterners to exhume the bodies of their loved ones who’d died there in its heyday as a convalescent home. These same families had other sons, uncles, fathers, buried in mass graves on battlefields and they would suffer no more of theirs to lie in Southern dirt. An agent had been sent ahead to confirm usufruct with the current owners of the land—apparently a Christian Home for Wayward Girls and Frail Women—but the agent had embarked instead on an epic whoring drunk on the company dime. When conscience and sobriety overtook him at the end of his weeklong spree, the agent forged the necessary papers and reported to the Northeasterners that all was well and the disinterment could proceed.

  In the late morning the oxcarts passed through the last stand of stunted trees and halted, the teams grunting and stamping at the parched ground. The men shifted where they sat among the coffins, their excitement at seeing a place packed with easy women suddenly stolen, like their breath, as the flyblown stench enclosed them and they watched their foreman get down and make his way past the stilled outbuildings, heading toward the cottage.

  —You smell that?

  —Hoo lord.

  —Maybe they already dug them boys up.

  The foreman waited on the porch, knocking, calling out to the shuttered windows, before he finally nudged the unlatched door open and stepped inside. The workmen watched. For what seemed to them a long time everything was quiet, nothing moved. When the foreman reappeared, ash-gray and quaking, he stumbled out into the yard, where he sat on a stump with his head in his hands and couldn’t, for all the good-natured questions of the men who came to his side, be persuaded to move or to say what he’d seen. The workmen left him with his thoughts, the image which would never leave him all the days of his life, and went into the cottage and the bunkhouses and saw for themselves. Soon the sound of them retching and their shouts of astonishment reached the foreman, who remained motionless on his stump as they came to join him in his daze. Few of the men who were there that day would know good sleep again.

  Later the theory was put forward that some disease had swept through the place, but the bodies were so far gone that the cause of death was only de
termined months later by a coroner’s inquest held at the capitol, the details of which (the depositions of the workmen and the coroner’s report describing the suicide by poisoning of some fourteen persons) were quickly and quietly buried, with the ease available to men governing a state that had in recent memory been wild and who wanted nothing more than to show that it was a prime and fortunate place in the world.

  Four

  They were now many miles into the countryside, heading west. Three nights on the road, or what passed for a road, without encountering another soul. Neda had chosen their direction for the clouds she’d seen lowering on the day she’d saved Isaac from the pool. The promise of rain. She did not seek civilization or the company of people; that part of her had died in the desperation that made her finally abandon the only person she had ever loved. And more, she knew what the law of this country held in store for an unaccompanied woman with a child, much less a woman of her nature: these were the days when it was seen as fit to remove all the errant from our midst, the days of asylums, the days when a husband or some other man might, with a signature, consign an impudent wife to a five-by-eight cell for the rest of her life. Neda had spent some time in similar quarters, on charges of degeneracy, and sworn she never would again.

  When they slept the boy would make a trap of himself, wedging his hands flat under her so that if Neda stirred in the night he would know and wake also. Feeling him there, or seeing him in full light in disintegrating clothes or sucking on a moonsnail shell, she would be overcome with loss and the cruel strangeness of it all, like someone who escapes their burning house with whatever object is at hand, watching her former life turn to ashes in the sky.

  In the sawgrass plains that skirted the coast, she pulled sandspurs from Isaac’s long brown hair and snapped stalks of aloe to rub into his skin and hers. When they came upon signs of habitation—smoke or tended roads—they began to travel at night. Dawn would find her thatching out a blind for them to sleep in, and as soon as Neda lay down, he’d be there, his hands wedged beneath where she was heaviest. He seldom spoke, but by the sixth day he’d begun to call her mama and she didn’t have the heart to stop him.

  They caught the rain on the afternoon of the eighth day, the sky burst, the ground suddenly rushing past their feet. As they came into a stretch of thick woods Neda fell to her knees and drank from where the roots of an oak formed a bowl. Isaac, watching, did the same.

  The rain kept on and hid all sound, so Neda spoke her secrets and her rage. Things she’d told his mother and things she never could.

  —You only let me touch you because you were tired and selfish. You never loved me and you never loved him. You were cruel. You were stupid.

  The sky webbed with lightning as she lifted him to cross a swollen creek. Slipping in the slick clay of the disappearing bank, she gripped roots exposed by the flood and had to hold tightly to keep them both from being swept away.

  —I was weak and worthless, but I loved you and that mattered.

  They walked through the heart of the storm, the boy riding her back. Darkness fell and Neda knew she was climbing only by the pain in her thighs. The ache and burn fading as they reached the crest, then a blast of light stunned her and a great outrush of motion, something fast and enormous blowing by them in the dark.

  Thrown backward, she curled, cupping Isaac’s head as the ground around them trembled. At dawn the rain had cleared and Neda saw they had fallen beside some train tracks. Not six inches from the ties. She stood and helped the boy to stand, and they saw spread out before them clear-cut woods, the stumps of yellow and longleaf pine pocking the land from the other side of the train tracks to the horizon, where only a low, dark line held the promise of cover.

  In Isaac’s memory, all of this was changed. The teachers at the West Florida Baptist Boys’ Home where he would live from the age of two to six would urge him to recall his early childhood as steeped in the sin of another, something that was only overcome and ended by the good graces of the Lord. His mother was an unsaved sinner who’d abandoned him after putting him through a short stint of earthly hell, and he was lucky to be where he was.

  But there were moments that returned to him. Trees towering and then no trees at all. Waves of heat and the baked body of a dead thing in the grass. Thirst. Lying on the ground, feeling the warm dirt against his belly, drinking dirty water from a pond; the ground a deep burnt orange veined with gray clay and wisps of white sand, a place where the water is the color of the ground.

  It must be said that the Baptists were doing what they thought best, but the same theology that urged them to acts of uncommon charity also insisted that behind each life was a sin-steeped story ending in either redemption or damnation—most often, the latter. So his story, his life and hers with it, would be made to fit the frame.

  As it happened, Neda had drunk first from the clay pit and only when she’d judged it vile but not poisonous had she prodded him to do the same, turning from the sight of a child having to drink like a dog.

  The sound of her choking and the sight of her tears did not survive, only the color. An aura marking time. Not her strong hands carrying him and parting branches from their way, not her voice, not her sorrow, not her love.

  In his dreams there is a woman and she lifts him above the flood. Her hair is long and black-red, and she ties it with blades of sawgrass so that she seems to come out of the earth. Out of the woods they travel. She holds his hand and pulls him and there is always some danger to escape; she is always frightened. She lifts him from the baking ground the color of the water he’s choked down and wipes his face with the inside of her wrist. She is not his mother, but something more. And she would exist in the secret place beyond the teachers and their god and the sins they had invented for her. In him, among the animals. Safe from what memory and men would have.

  Five

  Three hunters and as many hounds pursued them in the woods west of Round Lake. The hunters were on horseback and had been afield for half the night in search of coons but now had a mind for other sport. They rode and whooped, drunk enough to be both ardent and confused, even on a cloudless night. The moon high, the woods silvered and unreal.

  She ran through this nightmare country with Isaac on her back, panting up the hills and thrashing through the tangled growth. She hid with him in foxdens ripe with urine and in the boughs of trees. And when she would judge the hunters far enough away and she would quit whatever hidingplace she’d found, the hunters would by fool luck stumble on their trail again. She ran on, hearing in the distance the hunters’ laughter and cries that were meant to mimic that of the Indians their forefathers had driven out.

  Dropped alone in that stretch of pinewoods stood Bill’s Wineshop, a tavern for railmen of the F.C.&P. line. At that hour, past two in the morning, an engineer from Georgia swayed pissing from the back porch. A mist had crept over the open ground between the tavern and the trees, and through it burst a woman with a small child padlocked around her neck. The Georgia engineer watched her race out of the mist and past the tavern, over the rail lines and into the next stand of trees. When the hunters rode cursing into the yard, their blown horses jostling to the trough, he was standing in the same place, staring at the woods into which she’d disappeared and shaking his head at how strange life was. Seeing the hunters, the Georgian called out to his fellows at the bar, who soon appeared on the porch righteous and armed with wrenches and axehandles thwacking in their hard hands. Only one hunter managed to escape the fight that followed, but he would be enough.

  Neda heard the gunfire and screams and hurried deeper into the woods, sliding downhill to the moonlit mirror of a lake, and skirting this came into a region of rushing creeks and the sound of deeper waters falling. In a clearing she stopped before the ruins of a grist mill that had supplied soldiers of the late war. Stripped of wood and rope, the fulcrum cast off into the bushes, the millstones lay gray and massive like overturned megaliths, shoots of bamboo growing through their bores. She fell b
ehind the millstones, gasping, and eased Isaac down into the wedge between the surfaces of cold granite flecked with quartz that sparkled in the moonlight, where he sat wrenching at his wrists like a man released from shackles, eyes wide and searching.

  —Stay, she said, then went quiet, listening.

  But Isaac tried to crawl out, the hands of the woman he would remember as his mother forcing him deeper into the gap until he was stuck there like a seed between the millstones. He heard the horse and hunter coming on and was overcome with horror when Neda bolted up and scrambled out of sight.

  He was suddenly alone, and what can be said of such a moment and the fear he felt except that it was terrible and total. Isaac shut his eyes and imagined himself in a den of warm animals, watched over by beings greater than himself, as the sounds of running and shouts and the thundering horse grew distant for a time, so he could almost believe that everything was better, and then the night exploded into screams.

  For the pounding of her blood and breath, Neda hadn’t heard the roar of the waterfall until she’d almost gone over the rim. Pitched forward by her own momentum, she clawed at the limbs and roots that grew there, catching herself at the last moment on a sapling’s stubborn trunk. She hung there as leaves blown by her progress drifted on currents of air into the mouth of the tight stone chute whose bottom she couldn’t see, and she had just begun to pull herself up when horse and hunter plunged over the side, and were suspended for an unreal instant in the open air, a tangle of rein and man and mane, before dropping out of sight. Though not of sound. It takes a long time for men and horses to die of shattered bones.

  Isaac in the space between the stones, afraid to open his eyes. Trying to stop hearing what he heard. But then there she was, kneeling at the gap, all cut and bloody but whole and here and saying to come out. It’s all right now.