by Jeffrey Lent
Which was simple and nothing more than what she expected. Some part of her as he stood even thinking it was what she wanted. As if unknown but inevitable. As if that door finally glimpsed. He crossed swift to her and she saw and heard and felt each footfall in her chest as if synchronized to her heartbeat. When he stood before her she saw a waver once in his eyes and she thought Go on and the waver was gone. The wounded soldier a head shorter than she before him.
He struck her with his one balled fist hard just below her ribcage and she fell forward toward him and the fist came off her and raised to clip her chin, snapping her teeth together and a sound came from her, a drawn half-cry, half-sob, and he caught her as she sagged, grasping her wrist and turning it under itself as she was spun with her back to him. He pressed her wrist up deep below her shoulder blades and she felt the joint of her shoulder strain. He held it there and pressed up behind her and moved her forward toward the table, she still bent forward with no wind. Then her torso was flat against the table and he dropped her wrist to reach down and lift her skirts over her hips, her cheek harsh against the oiled planks, smelling the taint of old food, her nose burned raw by the shove down. All the time Alex not speaking, his breath ragged and raw like a rusted crosscut blade moving through punked timber, his hand swimming over her bared rear and then down between her legs, opening her. His fingers were soft from his weeks in bed or sitting upright in a chair, and she was wet under them and ashamed and shocked by the betrayal of her body, as if her body was somehow to blame. She knew it was not but still felt it open to him. Then his hand was gone and he used it to open the flies of his trousers, Leah hearing the buttons pop open with the soft snick of fabric. She got both hands flat against the table and didn’t just come upright but backwards also, her right elbow leading to drive into his open crotch, to strike hard into his scrotum. He sagged away from her, mewling sounds from his lips and it was only then she realized he’d been chanting the whole time, words not to her but to himself, words meant to carry him forward: ‘little nigger bitch, little nigger bitch.’ She was upright now and stepped to the stove and turned back, raising the hot iron over where he was still crouched, both his arms over his crotch as if that was what was wrong with him, as if that was what she meant to hurt and she brought the iron down against the side of his head, not even as hard as she meant to. His head seemed to bounce from his shoulder and raise up again to face her, a cry just starting from his lips when she brought it down again, the edge of it catching hard and deep just above his ear. This time she saw it split his scalp, saw the fine auburn hair part and render up torn whiteness like marrow that then ran quick with blood, not gushing but filling his hair and draining down onto his face. He tried to raise both arms to stop her, and then tried to cover the bloodflow from his head but only the one hand reached there, a small ineffectual cap over the flush of blood. Then that hand fell away, lank against him and his head tilted back as his eyes rolled up awful whites toward her. His head was a mat of blood and his pants were tangled down around his thighs. Her breath was hot with great infrequent blasts, and she stepped back and set the iron back on the stove. The smell of burned hair and blood rose from it. She looked at him. He lay not moving. She stepped forward and words came more hiss than sound, “Fuck that white fuck,” and she raised her foot and kicked him hard in his open slack genitals. It was full dark outside and the light was dim from the one lamp on the table. She bent and cupped the chimney and blew out the wick. She went out the door into the sleeting rain. She pulled the door shut hard and silent behind her.
She moved fast, not running, not yet, past the cabin with her mother and Rey and around the garden, the rain wetting her quickly. She went around the stable, empty of horses all gone to war, to rap hard the door of the small attached shed, the one paned windowglass lit low from within and a voice called for her to enter, the voice so low as to be missed in the rain but she was straining for it and pushed the door and stepped inside. The old man sitting at what had once been a cobbler’s bench in the center of the room, his bed off to one side and a small table and single chair the only other furniture. A small fire in the grate. One wall hung with harness, this the fancy set he and Mebane had hid from the requisition officers, the brass buckles and ornamental rivets like gold in the low light. He had a bridle on the pommel of the bench, polishing the brass with an ash slurry and fine cloth. He kept working as she came in but with his eyes on her, not speaking, waiting for her.
“I got to go Peter.” Only now aware not only of her heart hammering but a feeling over her as if she would break into a thousand parts if she paused. As if her skin was thin frost over an upsurging hot liquid.
“That so.” His hand still worrying a small circle with the rag. Studying her, his face blank.
She wanted to swallow before she spoke and could not; she crossed to the bucket and raised the dipper and drank and faced him again. “I got to go now, Peter.”
He nodded and said, “Bad night to travel.”
“Mister Lex lying over there in the kitchen dead. Knocked me round and tried to stick his thing in me and I busted his head open with a iron. So you pardon me but it seem like a fine night to travel.” Saying it put it behind her. She grew calmer, rapturous with motion, as if her nerve cells were already out before her in the wet night. Watching Peter fold his polish rag slow and evenly and place it on the bench before him. Then he stood. His eyes on her hard and fierce, not angry but clenched wide open. He did not speak. He stepped to the connecting door into the stable and from the back of the door took down a heavy greatcoat, ragged at the collar and cuffs and torn once low in the back. She’d never seen the coat before; it was the navy wool of the Union army. He laid it over the small table and from under his bed came out with a pair of boots and two pairs of socks and said, “Set down and get this on your feet.” While she put the boots on he found a sack and put three cold sweet potatoes still black with fireplace ash in the sack and folded it over and lifted the coat as she stood and put it around her shoulders. He put the sack in one of the coat pockets and told her, “Carry your shoes out and drop em in the lane back the garden. Don’ carry em far. Leave em right by the gate. Your mama find em in the mornin’. Cut crossways and don’ let nobody see you, white or colored. Get down in the bottom under the train trestle, opposite end of the bottom from that. Couple big oak trees there, you know?”
She nodded.
“Wait there. Anybody there, cut back up through and get to the colored burying ground. But they ain’t gon’ be anybody down in that bottom. Wait there or the burying ground until a man come find you. Won’t be long, maybe a hour but it seem like a long time. Just wait there.”
And then she paused, arrested now, alone. And said, “You ain’t goin take me?”
“Gon’ to go clean your mess child. You don’ need me hold your hand.”
“Peter—” she started but he cut her off.
“Get on out of here,” he said. “You ain’t got no time at all to spare right now. Just git. Watch your step. Watch out around you. Git.”
And so like that she left there, left her mother without farewell but to pause with a wet face in the rain a moment outside the gate, looking back at the pale windowlight of the cabin, left the white man both father and owner of her who behaved toward her as if she were nothing more than a dream of herself; but mostly she left Peter. That last fall before the war, following the summer she was raped, Peter took her one evening to his shed where he boiled water and made her peppermint tea. He sat on the edge of his bed facing her, she in the only chair holding the hot tin cup of tea just letting the smell rise up through her nose and flood through her as he talked to her, talked as no person ever had, explaining to her with words simple and precise what was happening in the world beyond her that was her world also and never telling her what she could or might think of these things but only how he felt and saw and believed. She sat listening as to a madman or someone speaking a tongue unknown to her and he finished as she drained the las
t of the tea. That might have been the end of it but for what he did next: rising and sliding the bolt in the door, he brought out a thin broken-spined primer and made her come sit on the bed beside him as he opened the book and read the first simple page to her. He then used his finger to trace out the words and the sounds and made her repeat them after him, over and over until it was memorized, just that first page with its poor printing of two children hand in hand at the top of the page. Then he closed the book and took her to the fireplace and knelt at the hearth and scraped back a layer of ash onto the bricks. He spread it thin and even and began to trace letters for her there, making her say them, making the sounds, having her say cape and cart over and over until he could ask her and she could make the sound without the word and know how it fit. That night ended with her promise solemn to die before telling anyone of what they did there. Daytimes he still ignored her although she watched him now, watched the dip and twist of his grayed head as he moved with the horses or in the flower gardens, knowing he knew she watched him and those odd evenings he’d sign to her and she’d slip away from the cabin and go to him and drink that sweet tea and learn to read. She used up the first book and after that another, several years more advanced, and after that pieces and fragments of newspapers, some only weeks old and others several years out of date that he’d burn after she mastered them. In the second year, he made her begin to trace the letters herself and make sentences of her own. And some evenings, when the reading and writing was done with, he told her also what he knew of the world beyond them, telling her news of the war and what he heard from the north or heard about the north, his authority never questioned, never given as absolute but as knowledge greater than any she might have otherwise.
But it was not until the wet February night when she left through the freezing rain without looking back once she dropped her shoes outside the lane gate that she understood it had only been for her. She’d always assumed that he shared something both could dream of or hold to, but she’d been wrong to think that. It was only for her that he held out what slender things were his to give and that night knew he would take no thanks for it. So she went through that night knowing it was love he sent her away with, sent her toward what would be the first of many meetings in the dark with strangers who might lead her a ways until they could point to a landmark or a sleeping place for the daylight hours. Other times only someone who passed on directions and landmarks and if she was lucky a bundle with some food in it. She passed the first of two months of living by darkness and lying by day in some shelter: brambles, brush, woods, twice a hayloft and once a thin pallet of blankets under a bed in a slave cabin. All as if with Peter standing far back at the beginning watching her move ahead, moving north and all as if she was racing down a long twisted channel of night straight into Norman lying bleeding and stuporous in the noontime heat and light. At first she was afraid of him because the wound to his head seemed a duplicate of how she’d killed Alex. Then, as she crouched watching him, she felt as if he’d been sent to her as restitution, as if the world were offering her atonement and rescue all at once. Knowing she could not walk away from this, feeling as if all her life had folded over itself to bring her to this moment, to this man, this lying near-dead Union man. And so she went to the creek in the woods three fields away and brought back the gourd of water to drip into his mouth and smear onto his lips until his tongue began to work and his throat to swallow.
She told him all this plain and simple and true as she could. Everything as it happened. But what she did not tell, what she did not trust yet enough to tell, was some part of her responsible for it all. Something in her she could not name or touch but which ran through her deep and solid as a vein in rock—that something in her had drawn all this upon her. That something in her cried out into the nameless dark for punishment of some sort. That she deserved all misfortune that came her way. She did not think it was her race or even the circumstances of her life thus far. It was, she thought, something wrong in herself.
He came down from the sugar bush into the blue-dusk bowl of the farm and entered the barn basement tie-up where his mother was up in the loft, forking down hay to the stalled horses. He let the five milk cows free of their stanchions and followed their shit-caked hindquarters as they filed out into the night pasture and slid the door shut after them. He took up the yoke over his shoulders and carried the double buckets of milk out of the barn, wordless meeting his mother as she came down the ladder from the loft and saw what he was doing. He crossed the yard into the cellar of the house, the stone-vaulted chambers cool and moist. In the cooling room, he poured the milk out into the long pans and laid them out by the well square-sided with even slabs of granite, the water in the well from the same source-spring as what flowed into the kitchen overhead. Here he could smell food and heard girl-voices warbling with laughter over his head. He skimmed the cream from the morning pans and dropped the clots into jars and fastened the bails and lowered the jars into the water to sit overnight. His mother came in behind him and spoke his name. He turned to her and said, “I was remiss not letting you know. I failed you not getting home sooner. Whatever spree I was on I still ought to have let you know. Truth is I never thought to.”
She nodded, meaning she knew that much. She said, “Father passed, I’d thought they’d send you home.”
“Would’ve I’d asked.”
She nodded again. She studied him, as to fathom, to reconcile the man before her. Then she said, “You surely brought a surprise.”
“Surprise to me too.”
She cleared her throat. Pronouncement, he thought. She said, “Father left things clear. We need to set down together.”
He nodded. “I’ve money in the bank.”
“I know it.” She paused and then went on. “I always expected you’d find some girl soon’s you were home. I always supported the abolition. Little it was but I did my part, knitting things that went forward to those folks journeying on toward Canada. You didn’t know that. It was quiet, you know. But Norman, this.”
He looked down, studied the earth-packed floor. The smell of the room sweet and sour at once with the new milk and cream and the dank wet coming through the stone foundations and the faint cleanth rising from the water. His eyes off his mother he looked up to the low rafters and said, “I brought her.”
His mother looked now up. She said, “She’s taken over my kitchen. Just like that.”
“That was me. I told her to fix a supper for us. Whatever it is is all my doing. And by Jesus I could eat that chicken all myself. You can’t imagine how it smells to me.”
His mother nodded. And was crying now, silent, the tears running over her face. Her hands wrung before her, tugged and clenched and twisted in her apron. He stepped the two feet and reached and laid his hand flat on her forearm. The first time he’d touched her since arriving home. Then laid his other hand on her other arm. She looked up at him, her eyes great and wide and wet. She said, her voice husked, “You recall that old song, Norman? I used to sing it when you were a baby, me jolly and disbelieving.”
He looked down at her and shook his head. “I don’t recall you singing.”
And she held his eyes and her hands curled up over his arms and her voice low and pliant with her whisper sang,
“We’re gettin ready for the mother-in-law,
gettin ready for the fray.
When she puts her face inside this place
we’ll make the old girl feel quite gay.
There’s a little ell room on the third floor up
where the beetles up the wall do climb.
Mother, mother, mother,
Mother, mother, mother.
We’ll have a lively time.”
He wrapped his arms around her back and drew her against him, feeling her now as an old woman the same way he’d seen her the afternoon before. She came against him and laid her head sideways against his chest and he stood high craned over her, holding her and feeling as awkward and rough as if
he’d been new split from some great tree, some man made from some material and propped up for all to see. He held his mother close against him, his breath warm against her shoulder coming back onto his face. He thought again of the woman waiting upstairs for him and of all she’d left behind and also brought with her to this place. It was her courage somehow that allowed him to hold his mother so close and long against him.
Two
She could not keep a baby. She miscarried four times in five years, each event a tragedy of silence endured at a scream-pitch within as Norman spoke in quiet tones that made her hate him a little, his assurances that they would try again, his certainty each would be the one to swell forth and thrive. Beyond the terror of her failure lay the restlessness of the small souls, lacking even the infants’ headstone awarded to earlier generations of Pelham child-death. The fourth was the worst in a way: a trauma of blood late in her fourth month, the blood thick and rich and darkening fast against the linen, the day outside brilliant against deep snowbanks of February, the window beside her bed hung with sparkling dripping icicles, the pain as if all of her body was clenched tight to hold the creature within her, a fish not to be grasped in swollen viscous liquids. They had kept this one secret until she began to show visibly and it seemed settled within her. Alone, Norman laid the creature too small for him to comprehend truly as a child in a cut-down egg crate and buried it in a place he would not tell her: under the lilacs beside the kitchen where the south sun had softened the soil at the foundation and where she could not see him working from the bed above on the other side of the house. He then carried the bundled linens high up to the woodlot and burned them with a brush pile on a day of soft wet falling snow while she was still in bed, and yet clearly she smelled the smoke of the blood-soaked cloth, the stench of her own failure passing downhill through the snowscreen. She rose silent that day from her bed and resumed her work, unable to not think of what small remains burned also there above her. The doctor was a portly man who wore pince-nez and heavy wool vested suits, abrupt and hesitant with Leah, ineffectual beyond assuring her this happened to many women, not helped by her silence over her own history and not improving upon her impression when she overheard him telling Norman that after all half the fun was in the trying. The doctor’s hands were delicate and timid, trembling slightly as they came upon her and she knew he drank but could not help but think it was her skin that caused their tremor.