by Rilla Askew
I shut it out of my mind. Not once did I consider it. I went every day with my hand on her shoulder like a blind girl—and yet I could see the town raw with lumber chunked on one side of the muddy road. I could see Bull Creek twisting away south and east in front of the log house, and the ragged ridge of Toms Mountain scrabbling away north against the washed sky. I could see the world, but I could not of my own will move forward in it. I could see this mark on my sister, but of my own will I turned away. When I could walk again, I kept her with me, for a little time I kept her, but I would not look at her. And then when I did not need her, I quit her. I set my face against her, and not only her but against Thomas and Jim Dee. Against the other whose name I would not speak.
Lafayette Lodi stood upon the crest of the ridge watching a pair of mules struggle up the slope against the weight of a flatbed wagon piled deep with slabs of sandstone. “You fellas yonder shove up from back!” he hollered at the two Negro men climbing slowly beside the wagon. The men stopped, each on either side, and waited for the mules to slog the wagon past, and then the two turned silently, simultaneously, and laid their palms to the tailgate. Fayette cupped his hands around his mouth. “For God’s sake, Moss, lay the stick to ’em!” he yelled. “They’re ’bout to set down and have a picnic!”
The driver, a big khaki-colored man in overalls and a felt hat, snapped the tip of the whip at the larger mule’s withers, and the wagon lurched precariously. The animals were not matched, one several hundred pounds heavier and a dozen years younger than the other, and the unevenness of weight and pull made a hard climb harder, and dangerous. They mounted nearly straight up the hillside, for Fayette, in his impatience, had not taken the time to cut a switchback but had only had his sons widen the worn footpath with a scythe, and the steepness of slope, the clots of winter-bare scrub, the loose rock and thick mud and rough ledges jutting here and there from the side of the ridge, all added to the troubled ascent.
Fayette paced back and forth on the ridge, watching the mules’ plodding progress, and now and again glancing below at the boggy road curving south around Waddy Mountain. His bright blue eyes were narrowed, squinting beneath his hat brim, and when he paused to stare in the distance at the nearly impassable road, he seemed to be smiling—an illusion created by the tic that tugged habitually at his jaw muscles, thinning his lips and nipping them in at the corners to reveal the startling white of his teeth through the mat of his beard.
Those who did not know him well—that is, those who did not happen to work for him or be related to him in the tight circle of family—thought Lafayette Lodi an agreeable fellow. His voice was warm, his broad, sunburned face open and lively. He shook hands easily and often, and the restless urgency that was the wellspring of his being seemed, to a stranger, no more than a lusty, unharnessed energy, so that Fayette—or Fate, as the local tongue spoke it—appeared to have a terrific passion for life, unmarred by fatigue or tranquillity. White women considered him handsome. His features were a trifle blunt maybe—the nose more rounded than would ordinarily be admired in profile, his complexion a bit ruddy—but that was offset by the striking animation that livened his burnt face, by the nearly sapphire color of his eyes and the rich walnut color of his hair, which curled to his shoulders, sparking the red highlights in his beard. Men found him a good drinking partner and jokester, and Fayette had the habit of asking them about themselves in a manner that seemed not intrusive or prying but as if he understood that the men, their former lives and present opinions, had undoubted significance in the affairs of the world.
In fact, Fayette Lodi had never been calculating or scheming in the manner of some white men who would seduce a man into telling his business and then find means to use that information against him. In fact, he didn’t attend to the answers men gave once he’d elicited them, so absorbed in self was he that he could not, had he cared to, hear. He was driven on to the next thought, the next question, consumed by a ruthless urgency that precluded his ability to witness any other human in the world—but one. And in his haste he pushed and cajoled and hollered at those around him as a man herds dawdling cattle before a storm. There were those who grew to hate this drive in him, but Fayette’s wife, at least, understood that it was not a will to power that made her husband dominate others, but the sense of being himself lashed by the unmerciful whip of time and competition and profound necessity. Fayette drove others—his wife and sons, the men who had the misfortune to hire on to him—only as he himself was driven: relentlessly, without focus or respite, and it was solely in the dregs of sleep, where he sank at night, undreaming, as a bullfrog in pond mud in winter, that he found peace.
He paused now on the bald sweep of ridge. Glancing at the road again and not seeing what he looked for, he turned his eyes down the widened footpath, cupped his hands to his beard once more. “Hell, man,” he hollered, seeming to grin, his voice light, teeth showing. “I seen quicker slugs crawling! Whup up on that off mule, fella, she’s near about walking backwards!”
Moss flicked at the smaller gray and checked the nigh dark one, and the wagon swayed and rolled like a drunkard, and Fayette hollered, “Reckon y’all think I oughta build her where she sets?” The snort that came from between his white teeth then sounded much like a laugh. He went back to pacing, his hand soothing the holster of the Colt he wore tucked at his belly. In his mind he could see the great rectangle of the barn outlined on the hilltop, solid, immutable, rising above the town for the world below to see. Never mind the impracticality of the steep rise, the great distance from the log house in winter. He meant to build a new house there as well, one day, not long, on the crest of the bald ridge, and the house, too, raised from native orange sandstone laid out in puzzled complexity, and permanent. His eyes darted sideways and southward, where the road curved a tan muddy ribbon toward Cedar, and on he went, continuing his restless, purposeless walk.
There was one among the three hired men slogging up the hill with the overloaded wagon who understood Fate Lodi, or understood anyway the profound nature of his hurry. It wasn’t the thick-chested mixed-blood driver, who accepted Lodi’s perpetual harangue as he accepted the unreasonable behavior of other white men, without opinion or rancor, because to William Moss (although he was three-eighths white himself), all white people were crazy. Certainly it wasn’t the jaundiced, wiry fellow pushing lightly at the right rear of the wagon, who received Fayette’s urgings with bitterness in his heart and the small, hard swellings of hatred; but it was rather the taller and browner-skinned of the two Negroes, who, under the rain of Fayette’s cajoling curses, now shoved at the tailgate with the full strength of his shoulders. He never looked up but held his shoulder to the wood and his eyes to the muddy rock-clotted slope of earth, his lips pressed tight around clamped teeth.
Even hunched as he was at the rear of the wagon, he was clearly a big man—over six feet tall standing straight up hatless and bootless—and heavy through the shoulders, broad across the chest. He was hatless now, having tossed his broad-brimmed Stetson on top of the load when he first bent his shoulder to the wagon, revealing to the watery, early-spring light the high dome of his forehead, the kinked hair shaved tight to the skull. His skin was a deep berry brown that seemed to hold within its integument a burnished light, separate from external source, so that even in thin overcast, as on this day, his face appeared to be lit from within by a luminous sheen. His face now was turned sideways as he strained at the rear of the wagon, the tip of an ear skyward, the clenched plane of his cheekbone raised to the sun. His mustache—coke black and bristling, the hair of it straighter than the hair on his head—twitched like a squirrel’s tail as he gritted, un-gritted his teeth. The expression, but for that grim clamping, was one of irony as he listened to Fayette’s rant: he knew the man, or he knew white men like him, and it made him want to laugh. He could hear, in the back-and-forth roving, the reckless spouting, that Fayette already had the barn built and the hay in it, the cows bought, the pigs slaughtered come first frost ne
xt autumn, before he’d got the stones he must have to build it up the hill. Beneath his breath, softly, so that even the fellow beside him did not hear, the big man said, “Better get your stones set first, white man.”
Fayette hollered down the hillside, “I’ll have to put on a little banquet for you folks up here next Tuesday! Aim to welcome you real good when you get here next week! Mitchelltree, put some damn backbone in it, my God.”
The big man grunted softly, the weight of his shoulder against the wagon. Still he did not look up, only listened to Fayette’s voice rising above the dry creak of the burdened wheels. “I seen you before, mister,” he said, his voice low, coming from his throat, through his teeth. “You’ll not be in no hurry one a these days.”
Fayette called, “Somebody’s going to be shouting Glory Hallelujah time y’all get here! Somebody bound to be praising the Lord! Suggs, you better lay down and take a rest now—I hate to see you break a sweat!” In a little while he hollered, “I seen a old terr’pin get to Texas and back quicker’n y’all are climbing this little old bitty ridge!”
The brown man, shoving, his head down, huffed to the hillside, “I been to Texas, mister. Them terrapins can have it.” He spat once off to the side through his gritted teeth. His voice was low still, beneath his breath, but even so, it rolled as he cursed Texas. “Damn rattle-snakes can have Texas. Let the Comanches have her,” he said. “They’d know what to do.” And then hunh, he let go a deep grunt as he heaved the wagon harder. The yellow-complected man beside him glanced over, but the brown man, his eyes on the brown earth, didn’t see.
As the afternoon wore, Fayette paced faster and faster, his eyes darting down the ridge to the wagon, closer now but still well below the rim’s edge; now out along the boggy ribbon of road, which stubbornly would not yield what he looked for; now up to the heavens, where the weak sun slid westerly far too quickly in the southern sky. He shouted, “Got you fellas a little liquid freshment waiting! Looks like y’all can’t get a better move on, I’m liable to have to drink it up myself !” And he pulled a whiskey flask from his coat pocket, uncapped it, and took a long pull. The cajoling was entirely gone from his voice now; the words sounded just as he intended them: a threat. He paced, nipping from the tin flask, his eyes more and more to the empty roadway, less upon the struggling wagon, and so he was not looking when the wagon creaked to a complete halt with the front wheels wedged against a rough stone outcropping a hundred yards from the top of the ridge. When he did look, drawn by the silence, it seemed to his incensed mind they’d been sitting there an hour, the smaller mule nodding half asleep in the traces and the big one standing hipshod on the ledge above. Fayette began to shout. “Don’t make me hafta come down there, Moss! What the hell’s the matter with you? Lay the stick on ’em! Mitchelltree, put some gumption in it! Suggs! You two shove up there! I can’t wait till next Christmas—you lazy so-and-sos mean to get paid, you better get them damn animals moving!”
Moss flicked the whip, slapped the reins, said, “Giddap, now, hyah, mule!” and the high-yellow man cursed beneath his breath and pushed a little harder, and the brown man breathed deep, the old irony twisting, turning sour, rising, without humor, to a dull, familiar rancor. He shoved harder on the wagon’s gate, turned his face to the side, and put the full strength of his anger in it.
“Y’all swing her around left yonder!” Fayette called. “She won’t make it over that jut there, take her around!”
Moss flicked the whip hard at the rump of the dark mule, sawed left, and the big charcoal jerked his head and released his locked legs, turned hard, forcing the little gray, and the gray stumbled as, with a groan and an aching creak like the cranking of a colossal windlass, the right front wheel began to rise over the rock ledge, and the front of the wagon began to swing left. The two men at the rear, surprised, feeling the shift and splinter of wood vibrate clear through their jaws, leapt backwards, the brown man, slick as a snake strike, whisking his white Stetson off the top of the load as he jumped.
“Whoa! Jeeminy, Jeeminy, look out now,” Fayette bellowed. “You’re gonna tip her!”
“Gee, mule! Gee! Gee! Gee!” Moss yanked the reins right, trying to compensate for the hard left and sudden lift, and then he tried to pull up altogether. “Whoa, mule, whoa, mule, whoa!”
But it was entirely too late. The weight of stone shifting in infinitesimal increments, hardly a fraction in time or distance but multiplied by gravity, magnified by the weight of itself measured in tons of earth-core, could not be held back. The rear axle snapped near where it speared the left wheel, and the wagonwheel collapsed sideways; the right forward wheel raised up, hung spinning. The tailgate split wide at the seam. The tongue splintered and turned loose from its bonding, broke free of the hounds, and the shattered wagon began to collapse downward. Moss threw the reins at the scrambling mulerumps and jumped off the seat above the wagon, as, with a quaking, locomotive rumble like that of an earthquake and a shriek of tortured wood and the hysterical, bawling bray of terrified muleflesh, two tons of orange-colored sandstone avalanched in a cloud of sanddust to the muddy flank of the mountain.
When the last of the slabs had groaned to a halt and settled, it was quiet along the ridge but for the scrabbling of the little gray mule trying to rise. Her front legs were broken. She struggled in silence, and there was no sound for a long while but the scuttering of pebbles, the hard rustling of the tall, dry yellow weeds. Stone slabs, some nearly as large as the face of a coffin, spilled from the broken bed, scattered like a great child’s tumbled blocks along the slope.
Then Fayette began to shout. “Jesus God!” He danced along the hilltop jerkily, his arms loose and floundering, his head bobbing, a half-strung marionette. “You fools, you damned dunces, Jesus holy Christ!” He saw the yellow-complected man in the distance, walking fast at a steep angle down the side of the ridge eastward. “Suggs!” Fayette screamed. “Get back here! You damn Suggs! Su-u-uggs!” But the yellow man was disappearing already around the far side of Fayette’s log house. “Damn you, Suggs!” Fayette shouted.
The leg-broke little gray mule had ceased to struggle. She lay on her side, heaving, still caught in the traces, the broken oak tongue jammed beneath her broken legs. The big charcoal stood beside her, head down, in silence, and the little gray made a sound now, seeming to call to the other, her little bleats alternating with, sometimes punctuating, Fayette’s curses. It was as if the mare portion of the mule’s nature claimed her in dying, because the sound, coming contrapuntal with the man’s, was not a jack’s bray nor a mule’s bawl but something stranger, breathed into the cold air on heaving shudders: a high, breathy whinny, begging. Fayette’s voice was hoarse now, stripped with yelling, but in his rant he could not stop. “Moss! Damn you, Moss, you damn stupid Indi’n, never get a damn Indi’n to handle a damn mule! Mitchelltree, shoot that damn mule for God’s sake!” And he went on, pacing, jerking, cursing.
The big brown man, hatted now, standing erect, enormous beside the hunched and miserable Moss, climbed the rise to a level spot above the broken wagon, spread the front of his coat, and, wordless, took a large, flat-sided, thick-barreled pistol from a left-handed holster beneath the denim. Immediately Fayette stopped his cursing rant. He froze, staring, as if at a ghost or a living memory. Mitchelltree raised the great slope-gripped gun so that Fayette could see clearly the four barrels stacked two and two, distinct and yet inseparable, joined together as one. Mitchelltree sighted briefly and pulled the trigger. The big charcoal mule jumped and brayed once, stood trembling, as the echo of a single powerful shot ricocheted across the valley. The ridge then was completely silent. Mitchelltree took a step down the slope, looked at the dead little gray. The union of barrels was pointed at the large hole oozing red above the open yellow eye, but another shot was not necessary. In a deep, resonant voice, he said, “Moss, help me get that big’n loose—he going to break a leg too ’fore it’s all over.”
The driver, moving slow, came the long way around above
the spilled wagon. Fayette called from the hilltop, “You! Mitchelltree!” but the big man did not answer. He stood at the big mule’s head, stroking the long, elegant muzzle, talking softly, looking calmly into the epicanthic eye, while Moss began to untangle the twisted traces.
“Mitchelltree!” Fayette called, the rage gone from his voice now, a sound in it uncannily close to the pleading in the little mule’s final whimper. “Hey, Mitch!”
Mitchelltree did not look up but went on talking softly, speaking secret words, low and deep and mournful, in the long silken charcoal ear.
His name was Burd Mitchelltree. The few white men who knew his Christian name thought and heard “Bird” when he told it, and figured him for part Indian because of that name and the sharpness of his features, because of the hint of terra rosa in the brown of his skin. A willing eye could’ve told them those planed features were not Choctaw or Cherokee but Anglo; that high, sleek forehead, rarely revealed, hinting already at future baldness, had not come down to him through any Indian blood. He was, notwithstanding white men’s poor vision or hearing, within himself and to himself Burd Mitchelltree, short for Burden, as his mama, without irony, had named him, and by so doing naming not what he was to her but what others would demand him to carry, when he was born slave to her as slave in Texas twenty-nine years before. He’d been four years old when Lincoln proclaimed emancipation; five by the time Texas got around to letting her own slaves hear such news the following June; six when his mother died in her slave cabin, ignorant of the war’s end or outcome, ignorant of the fact that her son’s Christian name was a sly parody of white man’s ideas. The name could as well have stood (though his mama was never to know this either) for the sonorous sound of Burden’s voice as it would become in his young manhood: mellifluous, minor-keyed, like the sorrowing lower tones of a bagpipe or the deep dulcet moan of a bass organ. It was this resonating drone he used now to calm the big, dark male mule.