by Jeffrey Lent
He fed and watered his stock and loaded the stoves in the brooder house and the laying barn and left the egg gathering for the morning, working through what should take near two hours in half that time. Working as one who gets the job done quickly not only for the stilled mind while doing it but to return to the tremble run through him as soon as he could. As if the brief time away was needed but nothing more. And came out to stand in the dark, the warm night, the clouds boiling overhead before a three-quarters moon. There was no sense to his life. He’d thought the child would bring it, that glimpsing her would run a charge through him and clarify his faults and gains. There was none of that. He supposed it would come, someway. He supposed he would love her. He guessed there would be a time he’d cut his arm away from him if only for her to use as a club to batter him with. But he felt none of this. He felt that love was only one more weight working to drag him bit by piece down into the earth. He kicked the toe of his boot into the soft deep mud and wondered why since he knew his destination anyway he couldn’t savor what came before. He wondered was he selfish. If melancholy was just selfishness. He looked overhead. The sky was a turmoil. There was no mirror there. The sky was its ownself.
His mother came out of the house and found him. Stood before him a long beat, studying his face as if reading all of him there. She did not touch him. He gazed back at her, not caring how much of what she saw was true or not. After a while she reached and touched his arm. She said, “You’ve got a lovely baby girl.” She paused and then went on. “She won’t have an easy time of it. But what a time you’ll have with her.”
Named Abigail, they called her Abby. Eighteen months later the second girl, Prudence, called Pru, was born. Then twelve years would pass and they no longer cared or strived for another. And so the boy was born, named James for Norman’s father. But Leah would not call him Jim or Jimmy. His sisters raised him as much as his mother at first; later instead of her. It was they who named him Jamie. He was as beautiful as Abby. He was a nightchild and would not work. He craved sensation of all sorts.
Three
In the late summer of 1890 the Randolph Fair featured the African Behemoth, a six-foot-five deeply muscled man who at thirty-minute intervals would step onto a low stage in a darkened tent lighted by gas footlights, wearing just a loincloth, his body freshly oiled, and for ten minutes lift an ascending series of weights while the standing crowd passed hand to hand a two-foot inch-round iron bar that would then be handed up to him. He’d take the bar by both ends and in slow strain so that each muscle of his legs and torso stretched and jumped bring the two ends together, the bar forming a loop. Admission was a nickel. In a box by the barker were the bent bars, available for a dollar. The real event was at night, in a barn or a clearing in the woods, depending on the town, where for ten dollars all comers could step into a ring with him, throwing down their ten dollars against a five-hundred-dollar pot to last three minutes. Again, depending on the town, this was advertised or not. The fee was high to discourage all but the confident. The fights were bare-fisted, with disqualifiers of the gouge or bite. Some men he’d fight slowly, with great patience and skill, holding them off and striking only to slow them down. Others he’d approach and dodge their first or second strikes to come up and hammer them with one great closed blow behind their ear or the base of their skull and end it. His choice was not a reflection of their ability but also did not seem arbitrary but rather some reaction to the man, some reading of him that had nothing to do with ability as he stepped into the ring made only by the pressing of the watchers. The African man did not speak during this; only from time to time would a grunt or suck of wind come from him. When his man went down he’d turn and walk to the low stool next to his manager, who was his barker by day, sit on the stool and wash his head with water from a bucket, drink from a dipper and stand for the next. Almost always the last contender of the night would be the local strongman, often the smith. He’d treat these men with great respect, grinding on through the never-ending space of trod earth and blows given and received and turned aside until the bell was close and the crowd grown silent. Then he’d slip his right in under the squared-off sparing stance of the strongman and bring it up hard to the jaw and watch the man’s eyes turn as if searching something far back in his mind. While this was occurring he’d swing his left around to clout the side of the man’s head and step back then, waiting, while the man would go to his knees and sometimes struggle there a moment before going all the way down. If he was in a town three or four nights he’d face many of the same men twice but almost never the last one of the first night again. It got easier as the nights went on. He knew his opponents. Immediately he knew which were drunk to face him again. He watched always with the repeaters for the flash of a blade; only once had he been cut. He broke that man’s eardrum. Most often, though, he did nothing more than what each man called for. His back was laced with raised scarring, as if a badly made fishing net had been buried under his skin. He shaved his head and body hair each morning. He received a quarter of the take, day and night. The five hundred dollars had never been paid out. He had a small cone-type tent he pitched in the relative safety of the fairgrounds or deep in woods at times he divined to do so. His manager called him Ben, the man’s corruption of behemoth. No one knew his real name.
He’d seen them before in the small scattered towns of the deep north where chance or circumstance had washed them up and left them and so the second afternoon in Randolph he knew more about Leah than she could guess when he looked upon the small crowd as he faced them, hoisting the weights more slowly than he needed to, and saw the tea-skinned woman flanked one side by a beautiful girl of eighteen or twenty and the other by another beautiful child, a small boy of five or so. He knew she’d married a white man most likely during or just after the war and come home with him. He knew it was probable that he was the first Negro she’d seen in a long while, if not since leaving wherever it was she came from. By her dress and manner he knew her as a well-off countrywoman who held herself at a remove from most of the whites around her. He was reasonably sure her husband was not among the crowd and wondered if he’d been at the fights the night before and guessed he’d not. With his eyes vacant and unfocused he watched her as he bent the rod and saw the satisfaction come over her face, as if they’d done the job together. He knew she would seek him afterward to speak.
Outside the back of the closed humidity of the tent where the light was rose-infused, the afternoon was bright late summer, hot, pellucid. He drank from ice water and without swabbing the oil from his body stepped into the red silk pantaloons he wore between appearances but left his chest and feet bare. His job now for twenty minutes was not to mingle but be seen. Long since he’d lost fear of being attacked in daylight by a man defeated the night before. The time or so it had happened his response had been rapid and effective and he knew he was better not thinking about it. He enjoyed these brief saunters through the crowds, his great bulbous head rising above those around him and the space that didn’t generate from him but the white countrypeople who surrounded him. In its way this was when he was most free. Both his upper front teeth were gold and he enjoyed baring them in a soft almost kissing smile to any who’d meet his eye. He enjoyed the confusion this smile would create. He was forty-two years old and had eight thousand dollars in a bank in Brooklyn and wired more each week. He wanted ten more and already knew the building he’d buy with a good hardware store on the first floor and living quarters above. He needed to own it outright and the rest of this season and all of the next would do that. He knew always there was a risk in what he did, the risk of being cut or shot, but believed this would not happen for no good reason other than it would not. He paid great attention to the men he fought and made extreme effort to humiliate none while still delivering what they needed. It did not matter if they understood this or not at the time. He’d learned long ago that understanding almost anything was what happened later on.
So he stepped into the crimso
n pantaloons and tied tight the drawstring waist and bent then to tie the cords that brought the billows tight to his ankles and had just straightened from this when she came around the back corner of the tent. The beautiful girl was not with her but the young boy was, and he was not disappointed by this. He’d had enough of young women in small towns and the mother up close was pleasure enough. Still, he wondered why she’d not wanted to meet him.
As she came around the backside of the tent the woman said, “Scuse me.” Her voice pitched and gay, nervous and off. He turned to her. The little boy back a pace, led by his mother.
“Well, hey there,” he said, giving nothing but still grinning at them.
The boy said, “You’re one blacker-than-soot nigger.”
The woman protested. “Jamie.”
The man ignored her and squatted, still not down to the boy’s level but close. He said, “Jamie. You’re mighty high-yellow yourself.”
The boy pulled back against his mother, frightened, the words meaning nothing to him, not reassured by the kind tone. The man went on.
“You’re just a little boy. Plenty people think, Little boy like that, he don’t know when he’s wronging somebody. They let it slide on by. They think he don’t know no better. But he does. He thinks, I got away with it once, I can again. Maybe so. But someday, somewhere, be someone won’t let you get away with it. And you’ll be thinking, I got away with it all that time, why this person get so upset now? And you’ll be thinking, Must be his fault not mine. But you’ll be wrong.” And reached out before the boy could shrink further and took his small shoulder in his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze just strong enough so the boy understood the message if not the words. Felt the boy quail before the touch and then push into it. And stood and addressed the mother, speaking to stop her apology before he was even all the way up. “That sounded like a lecture ma’am. Didn’t mean it to. Just trying to warn him off.”
Her features were alight. On a white woman would be a blush. “He knows better.”
He nodded, grave. “I’m sure he does.” Then, again without waiting for her, he stuck out his hand. He felt like a caretaker. “Name’s Ben. Unless you want to call me African Behemoth.” Grinned at her with the absurdity of this. Now more glad than before that the daughter wasn’t there. Wanted nothing before him to diminish or compare this woman to.
She took his hand, her own as strong and calloused as he expected. She said, “I’m Leah Pelham.”
“Missus Pelham.” He dropped her hand. “Picked a pretty day to come out see the show.” He waved his hand as if indicating not only the surrounding fairgrounds—the livestock tents and permanent exhibition buildings, the small neat grandstand above the harness-racing oval and the clawed field of the ox-pull, the thrum of the afternoon crowd, the smell of food fried or sugared or both, the giddy quaver of children’s voices set free, the cries of stock and fowl from the tents—all this but also the day itself, his hand rising to include the sweep of sky, the dry hot air of late summer. As if it were all that and not himself she’d come to see. As if he were ancillary, even merely an accident.
“I heard you was here,” she said, not diverted. “I haven’t seen another colored person since eighteen and sixty-five. I know there’s a family down to Grafton and some others up round Burlington. Likely some I haven’t heard about. But I haven’t seen a one of em. Where you from?”
“I seen you out in the tent, figured you wasn’t just after watching me bend iron. I been doing that the last year or two. Before that, Brooklyn, New York.”
“I mean before that.”
“Uhh,” he said. “Down home.” He spat. They began walking along the backside of the midway, the tents of the freaks, among them Siamese twins which were nothing more than a pair of Holstein calves floating in a tank of liquid in eternal embrace. Stepping around tent pegs, chairs with the seat caved or gone where the performers rested or took air or privacy between appearances. They hadn’t talked about it, they just walked, walking as they did the slow outer perimeter of the fair, the hidden backside. Once moving the boy loosed himself from his mother and went ahead, staying in sight but darting in and out of the ropes, up close to the freaks before veering away, not looking back but seeming to know his range.
Walking, she reached and touched the roped scarring of his back. “Seems to me, you too young to have that.”
His voice still almost amiable he said, “Some of us, ain’t never too young. You, you left there and likely think everything changed overnight. And look at you. You was in the house. You was in the house all right.”
She said, “We was town people. Wasn’t but four of us, colored anyhow.”
He looked down at her then. “Your mama must’ve been a pretty girl.”
“They was evil everywhere, town or farm.”
He nodded, walked on a few feet and said, “South Carolina low country. Rice, some indigo still then, cotton on the higher ground. I was in the field time I was six—seven.”
“My people come up from the same place, North Carolina. I never seen it but down along the coast. Big rice country there, the home place.”
“Your people.”
She looked at him. “Both sides. All the same thing, comes to me.”
“My daddy was on one of the last ships come into Charleston from Africa. ‘Twenty-three. Wasn’t legal then but that didn’t stop em. He was a great big man; next to him I ain’t but a shrimp, so I hear. White people so goddamn stupid. They bred him out, all over the place. I got brothers and sisters I never heard of. Making bigger and stronger niggers. What they expect gonna happen? White people so goddamn stupid.”
“You got outa there.”
“Oh I got out all right. I got them Union men to thank I spect, same as you. Thing is, it wasn’t like they was happy what they was doing. It didn’t have nothing to do with me. Those soldiers, I never met a one didn’t hate niggers as much as the next man.”
“Maybe not all of them.”
He looked at her and shrugged. “I spect not for you.”
“You no different than anybody you talking about. Everything lined up according to how much you high color or low.”
“I ain’t stupid.”
“You and me be as wrong about people as any white person. You know that’s true.”
“I never met a decent white person till I got to New York.”
“You met one there or every one?”
He walked beside her awhile. Then said, “Sure is a lot of snow up here.”
“I like the snow. I like that weather.”
“That man of yours. He treat you good?”
“He’s the best person I know.”
“Uh-huh.” Walked side by side, almost touching for a bit, Jamie out before them, ranging like a tethered wild thing. The man said, “You look like you done good.”
She deflected. “I worked hard.”
They’d come all the way around to the dirt track. The drivers had the standardbreds out, circling the course in loose clumps at a slow trot, warming the horses, the sulkies small low-seated benches over hard rubber wheels. The drivers with legs stretched out along the shafts, boots against braces. The horses straining, held in. Time to time one or another driver or horse, impossible to tell which, would break loose from the clump and surge a brief spate before cooling back to the pack. The races would be at sunset, cool for the horses with enough light for the crowd. Jamie was up on the white board fence, holding the top, his ankles stretched down for the bottom board. When he heard them behind him he came down off the fence and turned away from the horses to watch them come as if he were interested only in his mother and the man.
They stopped there. The horses long-legged, beautiful. She put her hands on the top board and held it. She said, “You got somebody down there in Brooklyn New York?”
“No.” Not telling the truth for the same reason he wouldn’t reveal his real name. Not for any reason but his own.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “You dese
rve someone there.”
“Time comes.
“Why you keep fighting these white men?”
He watched a horse and driver. Rubbed his hand over his pate. Weary now of this northern country colored woman. Sighed. “It makes me the money. And it’s what they want.”
“What you want too.”
He shrugged. She looked at him then, the first time since they started walking. Sizing him, he felt, knowing something of his deceptions, what he was leaving out. She said, “You ever been to North Carolina?”
“Been through.”
“Place called Sweetboro?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Just wondered.” The boy was watching the horses again.
“That your home?”
She was silent. Then turned to him. Stretched out a hand and without waiting for him to take it said, “Been good to meet you.”
He nodded. “Leave it be,” he said. “Don’t mess with it. Whatever it is, it ain’t gonna be what you want or hope. Sit right here and raise up that wild child.” Then took her hand, her hand right then for that moment all of her, and it wasn’t just his idea but her clear beaming through. And he felt she’d taken something from him, he couldn’t say what. The same or worse than sleeping with her.
She said, “I’m not going nowhere. Nowhere to go. Just curious is all. Stupid curious.” She snorted through her nose, contempt at the notion. Then curt and he knew it was all done. “Good to meet you. Watch out yourself.”