by T. R. Simon
“Mr. Polk, are you doing all right?” Teddy asked. Mr. Polk nodded gravely and gave Teddy’s hand a few reassuring squeezes. Teddy was visibly relieved to see his mentor in full possession of himself. Then he turned and looked over at the paddock, where four horses were grazing calmly, and his brow furrowed again.
“Where is Moss Star?” he asked.
Mr. Polk’s mouth dipped at the corners with sadness. He shook his head and shrugged.
Teddy understood immediately. “He’s lost,” he said aloud. “He has to be lost, or he would have come back.”
Mr. Polk nodded slowly.
Teddy looked around, considering the possibilities of where a frightened horse might go. With a large sweep of his arm, he motioned toward the expanse of thick woods beyond the rail fence that bordered Mr. Polk’s pasture, the land folks called Polk’s Woods. “What about back here?”
Mr. Polk bobbled his head back and forth, as if to say, Maybe, maybe not; hard to say. . . .
Teddy considered. “Well, we can go in and look for him, call to him. Maybe if he hears my voice he’ll find his way back.”
Mr. Polk pondered this for a moment, then gave Teddy one short nod. The three of us followed him to the stable, where he took the big, shaggy rope down from the outside wall and gave it to Teddy.
Teddy took the lead with the solemnity of a military honor and hung it across his shoulder. “I’ll bring him home, Mr. Polk.”
Mr. Polk patted each of us gently on the back, the way he might the neck of a good horse. It was his way of saying, Thank you for bringing Teddy. I was pretty sure that however much Mr. Polk valued his own life, he valued the lives of his horses more. No one understood that better than Teddy.
Beyond the split-rail fence, Mr. Polk’s property turned wild; a forest of tall pines, dense thicket, uncut cane, and rebellious scrub led you into deep shade. Daylight was there, but tall trees had conspired to shrink the sun’s power, and the density of the dark was palpable. The land here wasn’t merely fallow; it pushed back hard against any thought of cultivating it. Teddy led us farther in, keeping up a steady clicking and whistling, clearing our way by poking a long branch ahead of him to rout out any snakes. I could imagine anyone getting lost in here, not least a scared horse.
“Teddy,” I said, slapping at mosquitoes and rubbing my branch-stung legs. “You think Moss Star is somewhere in all this? Don’t seem like anything with sense would want to come back here.”
Teddy looked grave. “He’d go home if he could, just like the others did. The only reason he wouldn’t is if he was hurt.” Teddy was rarely wrong about animals, and I realized that he and Mr. Polk were way ahead of Zora and me. It wasn’t Moss Star being lost that concerned them. It was the possibility that he was hurt or worse.
For the next half hour, the three of us said little. We squeezed our way between trees and cane, trying to keep ourselves oriented. We came to some gritty sand, made soft enough by the previous night’s drizzle to show hoof prints if there were any, but there was no sign of Moss Star. There was no sign that anybody, man or beast, had been back here for a long, long time.
Every now and then Teddy would kneel and touch the ground, pass his hand gently over pine needles and sand. Then he would shake his head and we would keep pressing forward. He broke a branch every few feet, marking our way back out at the same time he was looking for traces of Moss Star.
About the twelfth time Teddy knelt down, I was standing by, looking around, when I made out something so strange I thought at first that it might have been a mirage. I tapped Zora’s shoulder and pointed. Teddy stood up, too, and when he saw what I was pointing at, let out a soft “Oh!” A few yards away from us, the woods engulfed a structure only two stories tall but imposing nonetheless. It was a sight that nature never put there.
House wasn’t quite the right word. It was more like a shipwreck in the shape of a house. While the Hurston house was the biggest in Eatonville — even bigger than Doctor Brazzle’s — you could have fit three or four of them inside this one. Big as it was, pines and cane and morning glory crowded around it so tightly that it was all but invisible until you were almost on its front steps. Not a drop of paint remained anywhere, and the wood, parched and bony or swollen with rot, matched the dishwater gray of the clouds overhead. Even the boards that covered every window and doorway were choked with dead vines swirling thick as serpents. If the house had been a head, it would have belonged to Medusa.
“What is it?” I asked.
Neither Zora nor Teddy answered as we approached it quietly, softly, as if it were a baleful spirit that might awaken if you startled it.
“Looks like an old . . . house,” Zora whispered into the eerie silence that surrounded the place.
Looking at it unsettled me — like we had somehow left Eatonville while still being in it.
“Not just a house,” Teddy said, stepping back to take it all in. “This is a plantation house.”
“A plantation house?” I squawked. “You mean from slavery?”
Teddy nodded. “The only folks who could have a house this big and this old would be white folks.”
“You mean slave owners,” Zora clarified.
The word slave hung in the air.
I tried to wrap my mind around it. “You think the folks who lived in this house owned slaves?”
Zora ran her hand across the moss growing on the north side of what remained of the porch beams. “Slaves,” she said, drawing out the word. “The word makes the pit of my stomach burn. Whenever I think of slavery I get angry. No matter how long I study white folks, I’ll never understand how so many of them could sit in big houses like this, owning folks who had no more say in their own lives than a dray horse.”
“We’re lucky we were born when we were,” Teddy said. “Just forty years ago and we would have been slaves. Imagine us being us, only slaves.”
“How do you think they bore it?” Zora asked. “How do you stand being owned by people who playact that there’s a world of difference between you when there ain’t no difference between folks past a few degrees of color? How you think folks stood being worked like mules?” With a gloomy look, she answered her own question. “I wouldn’t have stood it. I would have run north!”
Teddy nodded, his mouth a grim line.
“But . . .” I groped for words. “What if you couldn’t run with your whole family? Would you still go, thinking you might not ever see any of them again, ever?” I was thinking about how at one time I would have given almost anything to be with my father. I used to miss him so much that I would have been willing to die, too, just to be with him. In the end, it was loving my mother and Zora that ultimately kept me tethered to this life.
Zora’s brow creased. “What a horrible choice: freedom for yourself or slavery with the folks you love.”
Teddy shook his head and said, “Seems like no matter what you chose, running or staying, you must have had a broken heart your whole life.”
We all chewed on that.
We couldn’t imagine the sandy soil that bore the beauty of cape jasmine blossoms and yielded juicy oranges and grapefruit being worked by folks who looked like us yet were treated worse than animals. We knew about slavery, of course. Zora, Teddy, and I also learned in school that daring men like Robert Smalls and Martin Delany persuaded Lincoln to let colored men join the Union army. And there wasn’t a child in Eatonville who couldn’t recite the Gettysburg Address by heart. But despite what we’d learned at school, the outlines of slavery were blurry. Slavery happened to folks who lived in the past and somewhere else; our Eatonville was a place where Negroes lived outside of the will of white folks, and we only ever saw ourselves as a bright future.
I spoke my next thought out loud. “You reckon anyone here in Eatonville was ever a slave?”
Zora thought for a second. “My daddy, for one. He always says he was born a slave in Alabama, but that soon as he could walk, he walked right on out to freedom.”
I smiled bec
ause I’d heard Mr. Hurston say just those words. “He must have been just a baby, though. All our parents would have been babies by the time slavery ended. They wouldn’t remember it beyond what folks told them.”
“I reckon Mr. Polk’s old enough to have been a slave,” Teddy said. “Do you think he knows a plantation is sitting on his land?”
“Folks have always said there’s nothing out here,” said Zora. “Everybody except Mr. Polk, that is, because he ain’t said nothing ever.”
I fixed her a look. “So you reckon he knows this plantation house is here?”
“Carrie, it’s like you said yesterday. Seems like half the things we thought we knew about Mr. Polk ain’t at all what we thought.”
“You think this house is a secret?” Teddy said, raising an eyebrow. “A secret Mr. Polk knows all about?”
I could see Zora’s mind spinning like a pinwheel. “I suspect this is a whole story. Maybe it just feels like a secret because Mr. Polk can’t tell his story. At least not in a language we can understand.”
I shivered. It felt funny standing here on Mr. Polk’s land, looking at this hull of a house. Everything about it raised questions, and I wondered if not speaking at all was the only way Mr. Polk could keep so much to himself.
A few heavy drops fell from the sky and we automatically looked toward the old plantation house, thinking it might offer us some measure of shelter.
“It ain’t gonna rain,” Zora said, testing the air with her hand. “These are just bluffing clouds and teaser drops.”
But the drops grew heavier and faster, and we climbed the rickety front steps. Teddy took the steps two at a time and I followed close behind. My foot landed on the third step, but the wood was so rotten that my foot went clear through the board. Before I could pitch forward, Teddy grabbed me and pulled me up. His dark-brown eyes looked into mine. “You OK?”
I held his hand until I had both feet on the porch.
“Sure she’s OK,” said Zora. “You caught her just in time.” She grabbed my hand now and pulled me toward the doorway. Aside from a tiny gecko scampering away from us, nothing moved.
I pulled my hand loose from Zora’s. “I don’t think we should go in. Honestly. The floor is rotted through everywhere.”
“Just test your steps first,” she said, doing nothing of the kind. She moved inside and was quickly out of sight, off to explore the rooms on the first floor.
I crossed the threshold and took a few tentative steps into the gloomy interior. Dust motes floated across beams of weak light filtering through broken window boards. Strips of what must have been wallpaper were peeling from the walls. The entrance was devoid of any furnishings or decoration. Standing there and looking around at the dark doorways to empty rooms, I felt as if I were in a crypt that even the corpses had abandoned. I turned around quickly to go back outside, not realizing how close behind me Teddy was, and turned right into his arms. We stood there, touching, not moving, his face close to mine. I froze and closed my eyes. Suddenly, Zora’s voice echoed through the house. “You’ll want to see this!”
I opened my eyes and stepped back. Teddy was laughing. “Carrie Brown, were you trying to kiss me?”
The pleasant warmth I had felt a moment ago turned into a hot flush. “Me, kiss you?” I hissed. “You were about to kiss me!”
Before Teddy could reply, Zora was walking toward us holding a rusty old rifle.
We spun away from each other and gave our full attention to Zora. At least Teddy did — I was pretending to, but inside I was fuming.
Zora shook sand and dust loose from the rusted barrel before holding it out to Teddy. When he didn’t reach for it, Zora turned the rifle over in her hands. “How old do you think this is?”
“That’s a musket. See?” He pointed to the end of the barrel. “You load it through the muzzle. It’s gotta be at least as old as this house.”
I could see the darker side of Zora’s imagination taking wing. “You think they used it against slaves?”
The thought repulsed me, and I rushed to push it away. “Of course not. Somebody probably forgot it here during a hunting trip.” But my words felt hollow, and neither Zora nor Teddy echoed agreement. I didn’t believe it myself.
“You want it?” Zora asked Teddy, raising it to her eye and gazing down its barrel.
Teddy reached out and gently pushed the barrel of the gun down. “We got plenty rifles at home, and I don’t want none of them, either.”
Zora looked down at the gun dolefully. “I’m sorry I even picked it up.”
I was sorry right along with her. The gun made the house feel like a cage set with a trap.
“Best thing you can do with that gun is bury it,” Teddy offered.
I was still piqued by his antics after our near kiss, but his words sent a chill down my spine. I could see they left Zora unsettled, too.
“Don’t try to spook her, Teddy,” I said.
He looked at me, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth again. “Seems like you the only one I’m spooking today.”
I felt the slow burn of embarrassment heating up my face again. “I ain’t paying no attention to you whatsoever!”
“What are you two talking about?” Zora looked between us with curiosity.
“Nothing!” I shoved past Teddy, stomped back out onto the porch to find the rain had stopped, went down the steps, and began to push my way through tree and shrub back toward Mr. Polk’s cabin.
Behind me I heard Zora ask Teddy, “What did you do to her?”
“Me? I ain’t done nothing!”
The last thing I heard before I was out of earshot was Zora saying, “Way you always teasing her, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were sweet on her.”
I scowled and followed Teddy’s broken-branch markers, getting far enough away that I couldn’t see the old plantation house if I’d tried — and I wasn’t trying. The air was cooler now, after the sprinkle of rain, with a soft breeze moving among the trees.
I could hear Zora and Teddy pushing their way through the pines behind me, and soon they were standing on either side of me.
“Hey, what are you — ?” Zora began, but stopped as a strange crying sound reached our ears.
“Is that a hurt animal?” asked Teddy.
There was a big camphor tree and behind it a small clot of myrtle oak to the west of us, and the sound seemed to be coming from that way. We moved toward it, slowly at first, then faster. The closer we got, the louder and more urgent the sound became.
Then I saw something move between the pines. Not an animal. A woman — a white woman — standing not ten feet away. She was dressed in an old-fashioned riding costume and looked to be holding the reins of a bridle, but I didn’t see any horse at the end of that bridle. As we got closer, the woman turned and glided farther into the trees.
Zora moved quickly and called out, “Wait!” But the woman was gone. Not just ahead of us and not out of reach, but nowhere at all.
I began to shiver.
Zora spun around, her eyes bright. “Did you see that?” she exclaimed.
My mouth was so dry I couldn’t respond.
Without another word, Zora threw down the unwieldy rifle, grabbed Teddy by one arm, me by the other, and said, “Run!”
We raced along Teddy’s marked trail, ignoring the stabs and scratches from branches and needles as we flew. I ran till my lungs felt like they would burst. We made it out of the forest in a fraction of the time it took us to make our way in. When we reached Mr. Polk’s stable, we collapsed on a stiff mound of hay, gasping and welcoming the distance between us and the forest.
I couldn’t stop shivering. Teddy noticed, but my anger at him was the equal to my fear. I showed him my back, grabbed my knees to warm myself, and looked only at Zora.
Zora was busy trying to compose herself as well, but the twin coiled springs of excitement and fear wouldn’t stop bouncing inside of her.
“OK, what was that all about?” Teddy asked, panting.
“Did you see that?” Zora looked ready to pop.
“See what?” Teddy asked warily.
“The horse!” Zora shot back.
“I didn’t see nothing. I heard something — an animal crying, I think — but it must have been still too far away for me to see it. I don’t know what it is you think you saw.”
“Are you blind? A big black shiny horse was standing not five feet in front of us, and you didn’t see it?” She turned to me, afire with revelation. “I know you saw it, Carrie! Tell him!”
My scalp tingled and my heartbeat sped up again. Truthfully, I no longer knew what I had seen, even as I knew it was definitely not a horse. “Well . . .”
“Are you gonna stand there and tell me you didn’t see nothing, either?”
“Of course she didn’t,” said Teddy. “There was nothing to see!”
Teddy speaking for me only stirred up the stew of my anger at him, and out of sheer annoyance, I immediately took Zora’s side. “I did so see it! I saw it plain as day!” I was lying, but I had seen someone or something, so the lie rested on truth. That’s what counted — that’s what I told myself.
“But when we got closer,” Zora continued, “it vanished. Into thin air! I tell you, that was no Moss Star, or any other of Mr. Polk’s horses. That was no flesh-and-blood horse, period!”
Teddy rolled his eyes at us, and I had to keep myself from reaching over and pinching him hard.
“Zora,” he said, “somewhere out there is a hurt and frightened animal for sure, but you grabbed us and took off running so fast that we’re here instead of tending to the poor creature.”
“Oh, so you were just running to keep us company. Is that it?” She put her hand on her hip for emphasis. “If Carrie and I hadn’t been with you, you would have gone looking for that mysterious wounded animal in those spooky woods all on your own, is that it?”
Teddy at least was humble enough to shrug sheepishly at being called out. “Look, I ain’t saying it wasn’t spooky, hearing that sound and not seeing anything. I’m just saying there was no ghost horse.”