by Aaron Gwyn
“Are you poorly?” he asked.
“I have your child in me,” she said.
There, she thought. See how that suits him.
He stood staring down at her. Had he been ignoring it too? The two of them, walking blind inside this dream?
He put a hand across his mouth, thumb on one cheek, fingers on the other, cupping his face.
She started crying. She wanted him to understand it was her anger causing it, but she was too blubbery to talk.
And it wasn’t just anger. It was grief. She was already grieving this life they’d made, all of it crushed up inside her, swelling.
Then he was kneeling there beside the bed. He didn’t say anything. His face was white and warm. He reached and put his hand against her body, fingertips on her sternum, palm just below her ribs. Too high. She moved his hand down to show him where, and it upset her all over. It was being able to run that had always comforted her. No place they could put you you couldn’t flee. Not if you were willing to do what it took. And she’d been willing to do anything at all. Or thought she was willing. Now there was this. It was trust him or nothing, and she began to shake.
And here was Samuel kneeling with his hand on her stomach. Very ginger, very careful with his touch.
“I swear,” she told him, “you had best do right. I swear to God Almighty.”
Still, he didn’t say anything. She didn’t know if this was Samuel the man or Samuel the boy she was looking at. Then he removed his hand, leaned in and placed his ear against her stomach, and she stopped crying that instant. She wanted to tell him there wasn’t anything to hear, but he had his head pressed to her belly, and he was the father of whatever was inside her. This might have been boy-Samuel kneeling between her legs, but when he pulled back and looked up at her, he was smiling.
* * *
Her water broke in September. Samuel saddled up and rode into Bastrop.
She leaned against the wall, fighting this lightning inside her. She couldn’t stand to lie down for the pressure.
But several hours later, Samuel came up the road with an ancient black woman behind him on his horse. The woman’s name was Sadie and she’d midwifed since she was a girl. She wanted Cecelia to squat and bear down.
“I’m squatting,” Cecelia said, and then the lightning arced through her belly, and her breath caught in her throat.
The midwife’s skin was like a slice of apple left to dry in the sun—the same color of brown, that same texture—her hair white as cotton. She had small eyes set back in her skull, but there was fire in them.
She knelt between Cecelia’s knees.
“Got a head showing,” she said. “Breathe for me, now.”
Cecelia didn’t want to breathe. She’d hold onto her wind till she passed out, and deal with having babies when she woke.
“No,” said the midwife after several moments, “that won’t do.” Then she reached up and took Cecelia’s left ear between her thumb and finger and twisted it very hard.
The room went bright; Cecelia cried out. She was breathing and pushing down.
Everything came gushing: the lump in her belly, her water and bowels; it was all rushing out.
When she opened her eyes, she was sitting on her heels, panting. Sadie held a bloody mass of flesh in her hands, wiping, giving Samuel orders. He handed her his knife. He handed her clean rags and a bowl of water.
The boy the midwife offered Cecelia was very small. Skin like a cup of tea. Strands of straight black hair.
She didn’t know the name until she saw his scrunched little face, and the face produced the name in a flash: he was Robert.
When the cord was cut and tied, and Sadie had swabbed him clean, they swaddled the boy and laid him against Cecelia’s breast.
Then here was Samuel, nosing in like a dog.
“Give him here,” he said.
“Mind his head,” she told him.
“I’ll mind it,” Samuel said.
He stood there with Robert wrapped in his arms, rocking from side to side. So proud, thought Cecelia. His face was pure joy. He couldn’t take his eyes off the child. He was laughing and crying all at once, his eyes like wet stars.
* * *
Those days were another dream of life, another dispensation. She nursed the babe every few hours. The boy was very quiet. He watched everything out of his tiny eyes.
You are mine, she thought. My own body.
Robert squinted at her. He seemed to be trying to focus. He had very long lashes for an infant, very dark and thick.
“You are beautiful,” she told him. “Yes, you are.”
The fear and worry left her; she no longer had room. There was this babe feeding off her; there were the bare branches in the sky. A soothing feeling took over, and love welled up inside her. She knew that’s what it was, love like a warm rising tide. Had she ever felt it? It took in Robert and Samuel in its flow; it took in her own body, all three of them, floating.
She had refused to admit she loved this man. What was different now? It wasn’t that he was out there hunting and making rifle balls. He was out there circling. She and Robert were the center, and he was willing to circle around, bringing in deer meat and the rabbits that he killed. One evening, he came in toting a small, black bear. She didn’t know what bear would taste like, but it must have fattened itself off berries, because it was the sweetest meat she ever had. She wanted him to get another, but that was the only bear he could find.
There was snow on the ground in January. Wolves howled at the stars. She lay there with Robert between them, the bear skin at the foot of their bed.
I have a family, she thought.
That is what they are.
DUNCAN LAMMONS
—TEXAS, 1844–1845—
Fall of that year, I took another furlough and rode down to visit Noah. We’d hardly clasped hands and greeted each other before he said, “Did you hear about Sam?”
“Hear what about Sam?”
“I was in Bastrop a few weeks back,” he said. “Going up the steps of Alexander’s store, I look over and yonder he stood, talking with John Berry. Seems he’s taken his land payment and established himself a spread.”
I felt the air go thick. The sunlight looked like it was strained through muslin.
“What kind of spread?” I asked. “Whereabouts?”
“I didn’t see the place,” he told me. “But there in Bastrop County.”
I can’t recollect what happened next. I must’ve lumbered up the steps and gone to sit at Mrs. Smithwick’s table. Perhaps I even took a meal with the couple, though I have no idea what we ate or spoke about. How did I excuse myself? Did I pretend sickness or fabricate a lie? I couldn’t tell you. I can’t even remember taking my leave.
The next thing I recall is being in the saddle again, riding. The past seven years seemed a dream. I could hardly tell you a thing I’d done. There were faces; the places I’d ridden through; the wind and rain and sunshine—my skin told the tale. My father would likely have laid the blame for this at liquor’s door, but that is an easy culprit. All told, I’d spent barely six months with Sam, but those six months were worth a lifetime. Taken together, they were more life than all my other months combined.
Heading down to Bastrop, I felt the fog of the past several years lift and light came flooding in. I was as happy and hopeful as I’d been in my boyhood before everything got so thundering confused. The little appaloosa I rode was a good all-day horse, and as we went along, I told her what I’d say to Sam, rehearsing all the things I hadn’t had the chance or courage to tell him during that revolutionary springtime long ago.
I hit town round sundown and found John Berry’s house, tucked in behind his gunsmith shop on the road to Nacogdoches. Old John and his missus were at the supper table, and nothing would suit them but that I pull up a chair and load my plat
e. They were courteous folk, but once John had told me where he believed Sam was located, I lost my appetite. They offered me to spend the night, and as I was somewhat unfamiliar with the country, I allowed it’d be better manners to ride out come daylight and might save me a bad accident if Sam mistook me for an intruder. Missus Berry fixed me up a pallet, and I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to my heart strumming in my ears.
I was saddled up and riding before daybreak. It was a fine, bright morning, a little cool, the leaves starting to turn, the smell of cedar on the breeze.
I expected the homestead might be difficult to find. I went down a cow path through the turning trees, and midmorning, smelling smoke, came out from a grove of loblolly pines and saw a cabin up on the hill. If it didn’t belong to Sam, I figured the occupant could provide further directions. I rode up to the front yard and halloed the house.
The door opened and a lovely Negro woman stepped out, a baby swaddled up in her arms. She was small and petite with light brown skin and hazel eyes.
I removed my hat and told her good morning.
“Good morning,” she said, an eastern lilt in her voice.
“I am looking for a friend of mine who has property in these parts. I am sorry to trouble you.”
“It isn’t any trouble,” she said. “Samuel will know.”
The name did not even register, partly because he was always Sam to me, partly because a mother and child wasn’t something I associated with him at all.
She stepped back into the house, the door opened wider, and then, there he stood.
He looked older, a little thicker through the shoulders and chest. He’d grown himself a beard to mask his face, but I could’ve picked out those blue eyes in a sea of dragon treasure.
“Duncan,” he said, and his smile of recognition was worth a thousand bottles of bourbon.
I slid down from the saddle and let the reins hang. Ground-picketing we called it, which either meant you possessed a horse you trusted like your own body or you were too lazy to tie up.
Or too distracted. How long had I practiced this moment in my imagination? Now I was struck mute as a stone. I walked over and extended my hand, but he ignored it, stepping forward to embrace me.
There is something that happens to men of a certain age, to bachelors such as myself who never feel the touch of women. My mother had been very affectionate, and my father kissed me until I was a full-grown man. But then I’d gone decades with nothing more than a handshake here and there. Your body can forget the touch of others. It yearns for a while, demanding to be handled, but like anything you don’t feed, after a time, it starts to dwindle down and die.
But it can be woken. It can wake on you right quick.
Sam let go, stepped back and studied me.
He said, “Come in. Come and meet my Cecelia.”
My skin was still buzzing, so what he’d said didn’t quite sink, my whole body flushing, the hair standing up on my arms.
I followed him inside the cabin. It was well-constructed, and though the craftsmanship fell short of Noah’s work, everything was in apple-pie order: a fireplace at one end of the room, little shelves on the west wall—sugar, coffee, and other staples in store-bought jars.
“You’ve got it fixed up considerable homely,” I said, giving the puncheon floor a few stomps with a boot heel. “Did you build it by yourself?”
“Pretty near,” he said, motioning me to a clapboard table and pulling back an oak wood stool. “Will you take a cup of the brown gargle?”
“I would enjoy one,” I told him, taking a seat and hanging my hat on my knee.
He took the kettle down from a shelf, dipped it in the water pail and set it to boil on a grate in the fireplace. The woman had seated herself at the head of the table, still cradling her child.
A very young child, I thought, though I was seldom around infants and had no idea of the babe’s age, or if it was a he or she.
“Duncan,” I said to her, smiling, and she nodded to me and said, “Cecelia.”
“I am pleased to meet you, Miss Cecelia. How old is your little one?”
“Just under a year,” she said, and then she angled the child toward me. “His name is Robert.”
It struck me as rather odd that Samuel had acquired himself a Negro maid, but the press of everything had been too much for me to get my bearings, and out of courtesy, I leaned forward, wiped my paw along my trouser leg, and reached out to pull the blanket back from the boy’s face.
He was a beauty like his mother, his skin a little lighter, his hair soft and black as a raven. He mumbled the buds of his tiny lips, and I was about to tell Cecelia what a handsome child he was when his lids opened and he looked up at me with his jewel green eyes, Sam’s eyes in that miniature face—not the color, mind you, but the sheer blaze of them—and I jerked my hand away as though I’d been bitten.
Sam had come over from the fireplace to stand beside us. My heart began bucking like a stallion and I looked at Cecelia, then up at Sam, the proud father beaming down at his boy, his face full of love. Everything went dim. For seven years, I’d hunted this man the length and breadth of our Republic, and now I stood up, putting a hand on the table top to steady myself, knocking over my stool in the process.
“Are you poorly?” Sam asked. He nodded at the far side of the room to a sunken bed—likely the very bed where he and Cecelia had conceived this baby boy—and said, “Lie down a minute.”
Well, that was the last feather. I turned and stumbled out the door.
Outside, the autumn sun was blinding. My mare grazed in a patch of grass, and I walked her down and mounted up. I felt old of a sudden, very old. Sam was in the doorway now and he called something to me. I wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t show my pitiful face. I walked my horse back along the cow path and pushed up to a trot.
Directly, we commenced to burn the breeze, the leaves blurring by. I did not feel betrayed: let me say that right out. Rather, I felt that the hard hand of the Lord had swung down to swat me a final blow. And I deserved it. I’d done everything to beg Him for such a slap—all my lust and foolishness—and for some strange reason, I began to laugh.
Or, it was laughter that came out of me. It didn’t seem to be me who was doing it—certainly, there was nothing amusing. I felt like He had borrowed my mouth, just like He’d borrowed that of Balaam’s ass, that the Lord Himself was laughing, and I thought of my father all those years ago, riding Young Roger through the Kentucky forest to find me and Tom Yarbrough bached up together. The laughter died away, and I began weeping as my father had wept decades before, and now I understood. It hadn’t been out of shame as I’d supposed, but rather, my father had seen this very moment coming for me. He’d known if I pursued my heart’s desire, I’d find myself galloping through a wilderness in an unfamiliar land, an old man without home or family, learning at long last how all things end in judgment.
* * *
There’d been a time when all I wanted was to be of use. I’m sure the sound of that might drip with honey, but it is true.
Now, I’d ride into towns with my company, feeling like a vicious beast. These new settlements had sprung up after the Rangers had cleared the countryside of Indians—tribes who’d occupied those lands for as long as their fathers and grandfathers could remember. We’d come riding up the mud streets of Mustang Branch, or Chambers Creek, or Cibolo Pit, and the residents would stare at us from the porches of their homes or the galleries of their stores, eyeing us with disdain. We’d liberated these very places of Pawnee, Lipan, and Wichita. Of Kickapoo, Caddo, and Apache. We’d spilled the blood of a noble enemy, had our own blood spilled, only to be gawked at by people who’d stumbled in from the Old States after all the fighting was finished, folks who hadn’t won the land with human currency; they couldn’t understand why butchers such as ourselves were needed.
I began to consid
er the notion that someday we wouldn’t be.
In the spring of ’45, we rode back through Austin to pay Doctor Chalmers a visit. I’d put this off too long, not wanting to deal with the sadness of standing over Juan’s grave. Between losing him and meeting Sam’s son and paramour, I’d been drained. I’d never claimed to be an especially hardy man and the past year would’ve curled up a stouter soul than mine.
So, conceive my dismay when I found the good doctor had withdrawn his shingle and his home was now occupied by a tanner named Birch. He told me Doctor Chalmers could be found at the little hotel on Bleaker street.
I located him at the Cole’s saloon instead. He was seated at a table behind a plate of steaming bacon with a bottle of sour mash to wash it down. He hadn’t looked like a soaker when I met him the previous year, but some men hide that infirmity rather well.
He glanced up and chewed for several seconds.
“Captain Lemmons,” he said.
I didn’t care to correct him. I asked what I owed him for seeing to Juan’s internment.
“Internment?” he said. “We don’t generally bury the living around these parts.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning your man rose, took up his bed and walked, as the scripture says.”
“He’s all right? He just up and left?”
“Well,” said the doctor, “I never said he was all right. But he left, irregardless. You only missed him by a few weeks.” He sipped his whiskey and set it down. “Or a month, maybe.”
“I don’t expect he mentioned where he was going.”
“Not to me, he didn’t.”
I stood there thinking that now I’d spend another decade tracking down Juan as I’d spent the previous one hunting Sam.
Chalmers cleared his throat. “That Paddy still riding with you?”
“McClusky,” I said. “He’s with us.”
“Watch yourself around that man.”
