The fourth child, Timothy, however, had a will to survive nearly as strong as Maggie’s. Grown now. Handsome, for one of them. Kinder than she would have imagined he could be given what he was. What is he doing now? she wondered. Painting, probably. He had a talent for such things. Ruth had made Maggie scrub the house down in anticipation of his return, which wouldn’t be for weeks still. Scrubbed or not, everything looked the same to Maggie and would probably look the same to Timothy too.
She didn’t spare the adults. She knew her attempts would be puny, insignificant rootwork that was more dangerous to her than to her targets. But minuscule power was still power. Therefore, when she was able, when not under surveillance, which was rare but not unknown, after she believed she had gained a modicum of their trust, she would seek all manner of things to add to her recipes. Slowly, patiently, a few drops of snake venom in the sweet tea. A tiny bit of heel-ground glass dust in the hominy grits. Never feces or urine because that was too personal. Not even a hair from her head, which is why the head wrap was so important. She wouldn’t allow them the pleasure, the privilege of having any part of her freely given. And beyond that, it was simply insulting; it would only grant them even greater mastery over her. As with any good magic, she topped it off with a gentle humming that listeners often mistook for an ode to some far-off trickster in the sky. At the very least, if she couldn’t kill them, she could make them uncomfortable. Cantankerous bellies and the rare bloody stool were pleasant, reassuring results.
But she remembered that she mustn’t raise suspicion. She didn’t put anything in the biscuits this time. She recently received a warning in her dreams. Typically, she dreamed only of darkness. Sleep of the dead, they called it, and she suffered at Paul’s hands for it more than once. So when her mother came to her whispering, dressed in white with a veil over her face, Maggie recognized all the signs for danger and knew that she would have to be particularly cautious. Just bread for now.
The dogs were back, fussing and whimpering at the back door, aroused by the scent of the pork she started frying in the pan. She stepped out onto the back porch and into the dark morning. The sky had just begun to get pallid at the edges, but the sun was nowhere to be found. She kissed the air out loud in the hopes of getting the dogs’ attention, get the pack of them to hush. For a moment, they quieted. Then they started up again. She stepped down into the field and picked up a stick. She shook it at them and then threw it as far as she could into the brush. They gave chase.
“Thank goodness,” she said.
She gazed into the darkness, the same direction toward which the dogs ran. Whatever was in those woods, and beyond, was sure to be better than here, she thought, certainly couldn’t be no worse. When she was younger, she let herself think about what could be behind the clusters of trees. Another river, surely. Maybe a town with people who almost looked like her. Perhaps a giant hole where creatures lived. Or a mass grave where people were thrown when they were no longer useful.
Or maybe the toubab were right and there wasn’t a single thing beyond the woods but the edge of the world and those who ventured there were doomed to be swallowed up by nothingness. Nothingness seemed as good a choice as any, though. She stared and stared but didn’t move. She didn’t admit it, not even to herself, but she was broken. Her years on Empty had succeeded in hollowing her like its name promised. From friend to rag doll to cattle to cook, and not a single one with her permission. Wouldn’t that bust anyone up? So yes, she was broken. But she wasn’t shattered. She could keep passing her misery back onto its source. Maybe that could be a mending.
Essie, who helped Maggie in the house sometimes, would be up by now. Surely tending to that crying burden of hers, the one that nearly killed her coming into the world.
“Mag, I don’t know what I gon’ do. He look at me with those glassy eyes and scare me so,” Essie said to her once. Maggie looked at her: Essie’s hair was disheveled, her dress crooked, her face ashy with tearstains. She had only seen Essie like this once before. Both times, it annoyed her.
“Woman, ain’t nothing you can do now. What’s done is done. That baby your’n. If it’s the eyes that scare you so bad, close yours. Or hand him off to Be Auntie, who love that color more than her own.” Maggie replied with more sharpness than she had intended. She paused and rubbed Essie’s shoulder.
“Maybe,” Maggie then said softly, “maybe I could come by every now and again to help.” She forced a smile. “And we can get Amos to pitch in; I don’t care what he say ’bout it—’specially now that y’all done took the broom leap.”
Maggie didn’t really care what Amos said about most things. She remembered when, some time back, he walked into the study with Paul Halifax and emerged transformed into something unrecognizable; more beautiful to some, but to Maggie, every glint in his eye and click of his tongue was deception. Yet he was so proud. People liked pride. Mistook it for purpose.
“Good morning,” Amos would say with a smile too earnest to be honest. Maggie would nod in return as she walked by him and then cut her eyes the moment she was clear. She did, however, understand what Essie saw in him when Paul sent him in to her. It was nice to be asked rather than taken, to be held close rather than held down. Nevertheless, a snake was still a snake and its bite hurt whether it was poisonous or not.
Sometimes, when Maggie watched Amos closely—the gait of his walk, the upward tilt of his nose, how his habbage rode his back—she laughed. She knew what he was trying to do, whom he was attempting to imitate, and she knew why. She had no contempt for him but had no warmth either. He had a kind face, though sorrowful; the latter connected him to their people and this place. He was as black as virgin soil even if his loyalties seemed to lie elsewhere, where the potential for backfire was imminent.
Maggie shook her head and put her hands on her hips.
“Just plain foolish,” she said to no one.
She turned to walk back into the kitchen and saw that the sky had begun to lighten a bit and she could make out the shape of the barn among the shadows. That was where Samuel and Isaiah spent most of their time working, tending to the animals, breathing, sleeping, and other things. Those poor boys: The Two of Them. They learned, and learned early, that a whip was only as loathsome as the person wielding it. Sometimes, they made it even harder for themselves by being so damn stubborn. But never had stubbornness been so enchanting.
She didn’t take to them at first. Like all children, one was indistinguishable from the other. They blended into a mass of ignorant, pitiful bodies, and they laughed, high-pitched, without reserve, which made them too tempting to ignore. There wasn’t a single blade of grass that didn’t bend to the sorrow of this place, but these little ones behaved as if it could be openly defied. But by the time hair began to sprout around their sexes, The Two of Them had figured out (maybe not figured out as much as revealed) an ingenious way of separating themselves from the others: by being themselves. And the split exposed a feeling in her long hidden.
Even now, she couldn’t explain it, but her breasts became tender around them, like they should have, but didn’t, when she was forced to be Empty’s mare. Along with the tenderness of breast came a tenderness of heart. It wasn’t simply that they were helpful, that she never had to lift a bucket of water from the well or a log for the fire or a boulder to beat the wash when they were around. It wasn’t just that they had never asked anything of her, not even her approval. It might have been that the feeling had nothing to do with them at all, but rather with something they helped her to remember.
She saw something once. Just as the moon had gone as high as it would go, she crept over one night to bring them the food that she had hidden earlier that morning: a strip of fried quail, half an egg, a few apple slices that she mashed into a sauce, no poisons. She moved quietly from the house to the barn. She came up from the backside of the barn and intended to enter from a side door, but it was latched. She heard noises and p
ressed her ear up against the wall. A moan, perhaps; a gasp; the longest sigh ever. Then she peered through a crack between the boards of the wall. She could only see them because of the moonlight that shot in through the parts of the roof where the planks needed repair. Shadowy figures. From a distance, they seemed to be tussling.
She was certain she saw Samuel bite Isaiah’s shoulder in an attempt to be free from his grasp. They fumbled around the haystack, crushing misplaced saddles and frightening wayward crickets into the air. They were naked, sweaty, as twisted together as earthworms, and grunting pig songs. When they had finally come to a stop, their faces were pressed together, held there, seemingly, by their quivering tongues. Then one turned on his stomach. She hurried back to the Big House.
To ease some other pain, surely. Surely.
But what was that flitting around in her head and why had she begun to sweat so? What was she remembering?
Her journey to the barn became nighttime routine. Quietly, she peeked into it, gladly offering her soul for just a sliver of moonlight. She watched them from underneath ladders, behind stacks of hay, or through the back walls of horse pens. She had no desire to interrupt or even to discuss what she saw; simply bearing witness was treasure. For they were as frisky and playful as crows and her proximity made her feel as if she were in the dark sky, suspended upon the surface of their wings. Oh so black. Oh so high. Up there, where there was safety and glow.
But down here, they had better be careful.
She had tried to find a word for what she witnessed. There was none she could think of; at least, there was no word extraordinary enough, particularly not in the tongue she spoke now.
Why aren’t they afraid? Maggie found herself asking as she stood in the kitchen, still staring at the barn from the northern windows. She rubbed her face. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something blink into existence, shimmer, and then fade out as soon as it had arrived. It was the edge of something black. Then something swirled. With it came the stench. She could only see the outline, but it might have been someone on fire. By the time she reached for a jug of water, it was gone. A spot of dried blood on the floor right where the haint had visited was the only evidence she had that she was not imagining things.
The pounding in her chest subsided and she scratched her cheek to stop from weeping. Was it memory or prophecy? She couldn’t tell. Sometimes, there was no difference. She held on to herself regardless and put past and future things as far away as they would let her—as though that mattered. Visions had the keys to the cage and would let themselves out whenever they pleased. This condition had to be lived with. There was no other way.
The cage was unlocked when thinking about The Two of Them. And it was, then, no surprise to her that they chose each other above the other, more readily available options. It was unremarkable that they mostly didn’t pay attention to a woman, not even when forced. Not even in July, when toubab women would wait for toubab men to render themselves unconscious from spirits. These women—who went on and on about what it meant to be a lady (a term Maggie thought foolish)—got down on barn floors, pulled their dresses up over their breasts, spread their legs from one corner to the other, and writhed for the men they publicly despised.
Isaiah and Samuel weren’t moved in January either, when people sometimes huddled together for warmth. This close to a woman—whose skin and hair were dark with readiness, whose breath comforted and agitated, whose nether-scent threatened to make the insides of men shatter from longing—and neither of The Two of Them so much as twitched a pinky finger. No, those boys risked more than was necessary searching each other’s faces, again and again, for the thing that made rivers rush toward the sea. Always one smiling and always the other with his mouth angry and ajar. Reckless.
She looked out the window again at the barn and saw the sun peek its head through the eastern trees. The pork was almost done. She took a plate and wiped it with the edge of her dress and went to the dining room table.
She had set the table with unfathomable resentment. White table linen, sharp at the corners, napkin rings strangling, cutlery already its own kind of deadly. All living things smothered, even the picked-wildflower centerpiece. The dim candle lighting cast a brass shadow, making everything, even Maggie, appear appropriately solemn.
She had to arrange the table the same each day: Paul always at the head; Ruth always to his right; Timothy, when home, always to his left, and three extra settings for the occasional guests. She would stand around after she had set the table and listen to the family give, in unison, thanks to the long-haired man whose gaze always turned upward—probably because he couldn’t bear to see the havoc wreaked in his name. Or maybe he just couldn’t bother to look. Maggie only knew about this man because she let Essie talk her into going to one of Amos’s sermons one Sunday.
They held court in the woods, in the circle of trees at the southeastern edge of the cotton field. The man whose name she couldn’t speak for a reason was there with a few of his scraggly minions and she wanted to turn right around when she saw him. But Essie had begged her to stay. She seemed so proud—and something other than proud, but Maggie couldn’t tell what.
Amos stood upon a big rock that neither time nor water had worn down. But that was exactly what the clearing smelled like to her: the moist and tired things that hid beneath rocks—or, in this case, stood on top of them. There were about thirty people in the crowd then, sitting on logs or on the ground. That was before people started to believe Amos. He opened his mouth and she sucked her teeth. He wasn’t doing anything but repeating some bits and pieces she heard Paul discuss around the dinner table. She knew from experience that no good could come from folks spending so much time alone with the toubab.
She found it rather dreary. Amos did have a way of talking, though. More like singing than anything else. The rock showcased him in a new light. Sunrays came down through the leaves, giving his blackness a kind of golden hue, showering him, too, with the kind of jagged shadows that made men mysterious, which was another way of saying strong. And Essie seemed so pleased. That was what made Maggie promise Essie that she would come back and sit with her in the same shady spot Essie reserved just for them. Until it could be so no longer.
Until the day Amos’s words took a different turn, spoke of things that made Essie look down and Maggie lean back. Maggie immediately placed the meanness in them—toward The Two of Them, of all people!—and she gave Amos only a stern eye when she wanted to give more.
Uh huh, she thought, there it go!
“It’s a old thing,” she told Amos. But he didn’t listen. She didn’t wait around to hear another word come out of Amos’s mouth. She unlocked her arm from Essie’s, stood up, and marched her way back to the Big House, tall with lips curled, shadows falling down her back and light fluttering across her chest. She only looked back once and that was to let Essie see her face so she would know that it wasn’t because of her.
She stopped setting the table for a moment and turned to look at the barn from the window.
“Mm,” she said aloud.
Maggie suspected Essie knew about The Two of Them and never said a word. That was good, though, because some things should never be mentioned, didn’t have to be, not even among friends. There were many ways to hide and save one’s self from doom, and keeping tender secrets was one of them. It seemed to Maggie a suicidal act to make a precious thing plain. Perhaps that was because she couldn’t imagine a thing—not a single thing—worth exposing herself for. Whatever she might ever have loved was taken before it even arrived. That is, until she crept up and saw those boys, who had the decency to bring with them a feeling that didn’t make her want to scream.
She made her way back into the kitchen, grabbed a rag, and removed the biscuits from the oven. They had browned perfectly. She slid them into a bowl lined with a square of linen and set the bowl on the table. She held two biscuits in her hand and squeezed u
ntil the crumbs pushed through her fingers.
She looked around the room and then back at the table again. She wondered if she had the strength to flip it over because she already knew she had the rage. She placed her hand on a corner of it and gave it a little tug.
“Heavy,” she mumbled to herself.
She heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. She knew it was Paul because of how deliberate each step was. He’d come in the dining room and sit at the head of the table and watch her, like her wretchedness brought him joy. He might even have the nerve to touch her or stick his tongue where it had no business being. She wished she knew a spell that could slit his throat, but alas, that would require her hands to be used and she wasn’t certain that she could take him.
“Shit.”
Essie
Though goddesses made more sense, she agreed to kneel to Amos’s secondhand god—especially if it meant more rations and a wall between her and numerous sufferings.
Maybe not a wall, exactly. More like a fence, a wooden fence, not unlike the barn’s, staked out in uncommon ground, jutting from the earth, meant to keep animals in and people out. A fence and not a wall because crafty as some childish anger was, it didn’t have the legs to climb something so tall. But it could slip through spaces between planks. It thought itself innocent like that. And sometimes, that’s what toubab reminded Essie of: children of everlasting tantrums, ripping and roaring insatiably; stomping through fields with boundless energy; finding everything curious and funny; demanding mother’s teat; falling, finally, into rest only if gently swayed.
They were too young, then, to understand treaties, much less honor them. Signing them must have been penmanship practice or flourish. Still, it was the only assurance people had. So, she knelt; with the pale baby held snug at her waist, she knelt. Sultry in a way that her tattered dress, dusty skin, and loosening braids should have never allowed her to be. The strategy told to her was a lie. Toubab men were, in fact, not discouraged by an unkempt woman. Paul Halifax simply peeled back the layers, saw past the pricked and bleeding fingers that gathered a respectable 150 pounds of cotton every day except Sunday. For him, Essie’s thick thighs and delicate wrists were a kind of currency. She knew then that they purchased everything except mercy.
The Prophets Page 4