by Kevin Powers
“But, you see, I got to be someplace and there might be trouble if I don’t get there directly,” said Rawls.
Spanish Jim pawed at the scruff on his face. “Listen, friend. I don’t want to talk about trouble. There always might be trouble. The good Lord’s up there playing dice, far as I can tell. And some kinds of trouble is catching and some ain’t. All I’m wanting to hear is that you just a freeman with two bits wanting to cross this river the way a freeman would.”
Rawls stopped bouncing between his feet. He forced himself to stand tall and straight and said, “I got two bits and I’d like to cross this here river.”
The old man closed his eyes, tilted his brown head toward the impending twilight, and took a deep breath. He smiled, his teeth a checkerboard in his mouth. He walked down to where the boat was tied and fetched a blanket from the boat and brought it back to the fire. “You get up in that tall grass a little ways out from the firelight while I get this old bateau situated,” he said to Rawls. “Maybe if some folks come down the road to catch the ferry you might just want to hang back a bit.”
“Thank you, sir,” Rawls said. He went into the meadow, the grass nearly shoulder height and blowing in the cold breeze away from the fire. He spread out the blanket and looked up at the stars. He thought of Nurse, somewhere in the city, somewhere distant. A feeling which had for most of his conscious life filled up the shape of his mind and heart began to gather and concentrate. He fought sleep, terrified of what he might see if he dreamed of her. At the very center of his being he felt an unimaginable pressure. It seemed to bear down with the weight of all the stars in the sky and reach up from the unknown depths of the earth, beneath the brown bottomland dirt, beneath the stone. He thought he heard his mother’s voice. The voice said today would be a hard day, and so would tomorrow.
Spanish Jim and the boy John Talbot untied the ferry from its mooring and made their preparations to push the boat out into the cold brown water. “Did you follow all that, boy?” he asked.
John considered what had transpired as best he could. “That’s a free nigger over there wanting us to tote him across?”
“Don’t know no different, do we?” said Spanish Jim.
“No, sir, didn’t ask.”
“We didn’t ask ’cause it ain’t our business figuring who’s free and who ain’t. Our business is getting that boat across the river. Understand?”
Less than an hour had passed since Rawls first walked out of the woods toward Spanish Jim and the boy Talbot. The boat was ready. As Spanish Jim turned to whistle for Rawls to come up out of the tall grass, he heard a dog pacing and growling on the road at the edge of the meadow. He stood as still as a pane of glass. “Leave them ropes be, Master Talbot,” he told the boy.
John walked toward the dog.
“Don’t you walk up on that mutt, Johnny. Can’t count on ’em to be predictable.” To himself he cursed with a bitterness that would have surprised John if Spanish Jim had allowed him to hear it. Over his long life in Virginia, Spanish Jim had become attuned to the signs of the natural world. He could tell when a squirrel determined he was not a threat by its subtle but predictable sequence of alarm, then silence, then contented chatter. He could smell rain an hour out. And he knew that when a dog on a scent loped out of the morning dark, he was soon to hear the beat of horses’ hooves, and then the angry inquisition of the men who rode them. “Come back by me, John,” he called out. “I don’t want you to get hurt.” He took his hat off and crumpled it in a fist by his side. He could not bring himself to look up the road or into the tall grass, so he stared down at one spot on the beaten dirt, waiting.
John Talbot had been told quite often that he was a stupid boy. Perhaps he was, the way he indifferently moved toward the dog as it growled and started to circle at his approach. When the boy had first come to the ferry landing, Spanish Jim thought he might have been feral, raised by bears or a nearby wolf pack. He had heard that kind of thing was possible, and when John strolled up, not much more than six or seven years old, and began picking through Spanish Jim’s things, Jim couldn’t think of anything to do but beat him off with a stick the way one might do with a raccoon. A few hours passed before John Talbot demonstrated the power of speech. All Jim was able to get out of him were different combinations of the word “dead” and the name Talbot. Over time he began to feel a great deal of responsibility for the boy. He had started by calling him Dumb John out of a kind of habit, even as an expression of affection, an affection that John reliably returned with sincerity and free of complication. Eventually Spanish Jim realized to call him dumb would not work as a corrective, because the child could not comprehend the ways he was deficient, or the profound degree of his deficiency. It would be as useful as telling a blind man that he cannot describe the sky. And anyway, if there was one thing the old man Spanish Jim knew with absolute certainty, it was that the world reminds you of your troubles often enough without even seeming like it tried. So as their lives together fell into a comfortable rhythm he began to call him other names, very often ones he’d heard that people gave to those they loved.
Rawls startled at the sound of Champion’s barking. He felt for the tobacco knife, the small, axlike head of it cold between his fingers. Rawls slowly raised his eyes above the waving bluestem. Master Bob and his daughter and three others. Curiously, he chided his master in his mind for involving Emily in this business. Why this one aspect of the scene seemed particularly inappropriate was never resolved for him, because that thought passed very quickly from his mind and was replaced by his wondering whether or not he would die right in that field without ever seeing Nurse again.
The four men slowed their horses at the sight of Talbot, the dog, and Spanish Jim and came up abreast of one another. Emily stopped her horse behind them.
“Morning, gentlemen,” the old man greeted them.
“Seems like that boy there’s took to your birder, Bob,” said Sheriff Rivers. Levallois had pushed the pace, and they’d covered the almost fifteen miles from where they’d met up with him very quickly. Bob smelled liquor on the sheriff’s breath and wondered how a man could nip a bottle at the trot they’d been on. Wilson Baker was nervous. The tavern keeper had to put Rivers up after a bender often enough to know how he could get to peacocking behind that badge when he was in his cups. The only reason Wilson Baker was out of his bed that night was as a favor to Bob, on account of the good work Rawls and his mules did with the provisions he hired them to bring down from Richmond.
Levallois dismounted and let his horse graze in the meadow across the road from where Rawls lay trembling in the grass.
“That dog just strolled up like it was nobody’s business. I guess the boy took it for a stray,” said Jim.
“What’s your name, youngster?” asked Wilson Baker.
“Gentlemen, allow me to present my apprentice, John Talbot,” replied Jim.
Levallois unsaddled his horse, put the saddle in the dirt at the edge of the road, and sat on it comfortably. He lit a pipe and puffed hard a few times to get it going. Spanish Jim smiled nervously. It seemed odd to him, the man sitting there while the others remained on horseback, as if the search for Bob’s runaway was an afterthought to him, or he had become bored by the whole endeavor. Jim knew all these men by sight, and though none of them but Sheriff Rivers had ever given him trouble, he was especially wary of this man Levallois. Spanish Jim had lived for many years as a man whose complexion did not grant him the benefit of the doubt. He did not know if his people were truly Portuguese or East Indians or the last remnants of a lost tribe of Israel, but he had allowed those things to be said often enough when he was a young man in the backcountry of Virginia that he was begrudgingly accorded many of the rights of a white man, and those he was not were simply a reminder that he must always be on guard against the curiosity his appearance inspired in others, for the behavior it inspired might be the biggest curiosity of all. The only roofs he’d slept beneath since he’d left his family farm up by t
he Cowpasture River in Botetourt County, as a fifteen-year-old, had been those erected above jail cells. And he’d stood before enough magistrates to learn the difference between the kind of men who wanted only to collect power and the far-more-dangerous ones who wanted only to collect the wants of other men.
“You speak, son?” Bob asked Talbot.
John Talbot did not respond but looked to Spanish Jim for some clue as to the source of all this commotion. Champion had settled at his feet and gone to sleep. Emily looked at her dog and the dim-witted boy just a few years older than herself. John caught her eye on him and was transfixed.
“Sheriff,” asked Levallois from his saddle on the ground, “might I inquire something of old Spanish Jim?”
Sheriff Rivers’s agitation calmed. “By all means, Mr. Levallois, but I ain’t heard straight talk from no damn Melungeon in my life.”
“How are your eyes?” Levallois asked Spanish Jim.
“They do what I need ’em to, I suppose.”
“So would it be fair to say that your eyes took in the collar on that dog?”
“I guess they did.”
“Then are you ignorant of the signifiers of ownership?”
Rawls felt the pressure return. It seemed to move out of his body and expand into an orbit around him, the old man and the boy, the horses and their riders, until it enclosed what he knew of the world surrounding them. He thought that if he did not come out right then they would kill Spanish Jim, and maybe the boy, too, but the pressure spinning around the whole world still held him down to the brown dirt he had unconsciously clutched two fistfuls of.
“Didn’t see no owner till now. Ain’t claimed no ownership of man or beast in my life,” said Jim.
“What about your young apprentice?”
“He can scoot off any time he likes.”
The boy, as he often did, misunderstood, thinking perhaps Spanish Jim was saying he no longer desired his company.
“And of course your people would have made it clear that a white boy like this can’t be owned,” said Levallois.
“My people all been dead since I was a pup about his age. Burned out of our cabin on Floyd Mountain sometime before this last century come in.”
“And what if a black boy, maybe teenage, came down this road. Would you know what signified ownership then?”
“I been in this world a long time, but never once have I seen a dog collar on a black boy yet.”
“You might watch yourself, Jim,” said Reid. “We’re looking for my boy and that’s it. Don’t get yourself mixed up in it with that sass.”
Levallois stood up and knocked the remaining tobacco from his pipe.
Emily caught a sniff of it in the air and thought it smelled very sweet. She was half asleep in her saddle, but the whole affair seemed to her a great adventure. She looked over at her father. He seemed timid and uncertain. Perhaps because there are no mules around to whip, she thought. His hand nervously palmed the stock of his shotgun in its scabbard, which annoyed her. She had the sense that whatever Mr. Levallois wanted to happen would happen. What was there to be so nervous about?
Levallois walked over to Spanish Jim and said to him out of the earshot of the others gathered at the ferry landing, “You’re going to want to call for him to come up out of that grass or it’s going to happen again.”
Spanish Jim wanted to ask what would happen again, but he was too busy looking at the blood on the blade of the small knife Levallois was wiping with his handkerchief. It looked to Jim to be a very expensive knife, delicate even, with a handle made from an elk’s antler and a blade so fine he had not even felt it enter the space between his ribs on the left side of his body. Jim fell to his knees. I didn’t ask his name, he tried to say, but it sounded to him instead like wind whistling over the water where the Cowpasture and Jackson Rivers met to make the James.
“Anything you’d like to contribute, Jim?” Levallois asked. The strike had been so quick that the others had not seen it. He stabbed him again.
“What in the hell are you doing!” said Bob. “Look away, Emily. Look away!” he shouted. He pulled his shotgun halfway out, but Wilson gave him a nervous look and said, “Easy, Bob. Go easy.” He let it slide back in the scabbard, saying, “Look, Mr. Levallois, I just want to find Rawls and carry him back to my place.”
“I’m just trying to give you the help you asked for, Mr. Reid, in a neighborly way.” If anyone recalled that they had not asked for his help, it was not mentioned. Levallois seemed to vibrate, and the earth seemed to shake along with him, though it was only the exhaustion that had begun to warp the perceptions of those gathered at the ferry landing. Rawls felt the vibration, though. He listened to the terrible sound of Spanish Jim’s blood falling drop by drop into the scales of justice that would weigh his fate. He thought of Nurse in the whipping room at Lumpkin’s Jail. And he heard his mother saying that it would be a hard day today, and a hard one tomorrow, too. All his life had been a punishment, and though he had often told himself that what was meant for him could fall on anyone at any time, thus far his allotment of cruelty and injustice had not been given to anyone else. But now the old man lay bleeding in the road. Spanish Jim had done Rawls no harm. He was simply going to take him to the other side of the river for the same two bits as anyone else. Rawls did not know what people deserved, but he knew they did not get it. Instead they seemed to get what they did not deserve, as if the world had been built that way like a machine that could produce only one outcome. He hoped that he might see Nurse again in the hereafter, but he did not think it would be so. He stood up and walked out of the tall grass and onto the road. Champion did not move toward him. She stayed with John Talbot who was now kneeling and sobbing over a prostrate Spanish Jim and the pool of his blood collecting in the dust of the road. He looked at Bob, who had paid three hundred fifty dollars to own him, and said, “Do whatever you got to do, Master Bob, but do it quickly.”
Bob and Wilson Baker tied Rawls’s hands and feet and slung him sideways over Emily’s horse. They left John Talbot with Spanish Jim. “We’ll get a doctor down here, son,” said Bob. Champion stayed by John Talbot’s side.
They left a cloud of dust behind that settled slowly onto the nearby blades of grass and down onto the wet blood in the road. It fell into John’s hair and he blinked his eyes against it. He watched the riders until they disappeared around a bend in the road and then looked down at Spanish Jim.
“I believe it’s gonna be a warm one, Jim,” said Talbot. And Jim said, “I believe you might be right, Master Talbot,” by which he meant, of course, that he felt that knowing the boy had been the best thing that had ever happened in his life; Spanish Jim, the Melungeon from Botetourt County who’d been burned out of his home in 1800 by men who spit on his dead father’s body and laughed as they said, “Here lies Emmett Collins, King Turd of Shit Mountain.” That was what he thought, what a good child this dimwit John had been to him, he who had never known a roof of his own in his life, and never owned either man nor beast nor anything except the bateau boat he used to ferry folks across the James.
Emily rode back to her father’s house with Mr. Levallois, who smelled sweetly of tobacco. She felt sorry for the Talbot boy, but she was sure the old man must have done something terrible.
They made it back to Bob Reid’s place late in the morning. Levallois introduced himself to Mrs. Reid with a show of formality. “I regret we have not met before now,” he said. “Your husband does good work when I need it. Good work indeed.” To Bob he said, “And here you have been hiding a great beauty from me this whole time!” Lucy Reid blushed and took Emily into the house. He watched the front door for a few moments after it closed, then turned back and took a seat on the porch steps. He crossed his left leg over his right, casually, and packed another pipe.
Wilson Baker pulled Rawls down from the horse and propped him up against the tree Champion spent most of her nights chained to.
“Let him be from that rope there, Mr. Baker,�
� said Levallois.
None of the other three knew what to do next. They had all lived a long time under the assumption that the threat of retribution was enough of a deterrent to keep the course of their lives moving in a predictable direction. And further, that their hesitance to use violence to enforce their mastery over those they owned was a sign of a deep well of kindness and loyalty that characterized the tangled knot of the relationships of all involved. Among the five men gathered beneath the colorless buds of the sycamore tree, only two were free of this delusion.
Rawls sat covered in dirt and sweat. The spring air blew cold through the tatters of his shirt. It was precisely Mr. Reid’s equivocation that made him want to run again at night. He would admit that he did not know much about the world, but he had decided long before that a kind master was a terrible master to have. And Bob Reid was worse than that. He had fooled himself into thinking he was not really a master at all. The butcher who had taken the hatchet to his feet as a boy had demanded obedience. Kind masters, he had heard, demand devotion. But Master Reid seemed to think he’d earned Rawls’s consent. As if the pieces of paper in Bob’s safe with his name on it (and the ones with his mother’s, too) were merely a formality. How sometimes, as they rode on the mule cart toward the city, he’d say, “You know, Rawls, if John Brown had got his way, I’d still want to have you working for me anyway, even as a paid man.” Rawls hated this notion more than anything; that if white folks just believed they would be good in a different world, a world that did not exist, then that made them good in the one that did. He muttered to himself, “Get on with it, then, you devils, if you got the starch for it.”
Levallois slapped his knee and got stuck between laughing and choking on his pipe smoke. It poured out of his mouth and nostrils. “Hear that, Bob?” he said. “Doesn’t that just beat all hollow?”
