by Robert Hicks
Michel, one of the altar boys in our parish, followed me that night on foot. We had been at Mass, and as I was dipping my fingers in the holy water on my way out, Michel drew me into an alcove guarded by a blue Virgin.
“Why do you run?”
“I don’t live here at the church, Michel. My bed is at home, and that’s where I will be soon.”
“I long to be in that bed.”
“You would not be in it long. Father would toss you out quick enough.”
“So you would have me to bed except for your father?”
“Except for my father and the fact that I have no earthly idea why I would want you in my bed.”
“Do you not? Really?”
“No.”
“I love you.”
“You are a silly boy. I’ll go now.”
“Come outside with me.”
“No.”
“To the woods.”
Always so brazen, he was.
“Hmmm. What do you think, blessed Mother of God who looks over Michel’s shoulder? You look so sweet this evening. Guide me, Holy Mary. Is this the boy, and do you approve of love in the dark wood with a drunk boy, rolling around on the sticks and vines?”
“Who’s drunk?” He smiled and sniffed at his robes. He was still an altar boy. Years before he had discovered where Father Achille kept his liquor, and now Mass was always great fun for Michel. But I knew that he would not like the idea of the Virgin overhearing his rather clumsy seduction. He was a boy who thought it was possible to hide from God so long as he wasn’t in sight of His monuments, His churches, steeples, tombs, and priests. He was a boy who thought enough of the Lord to hide.
How old was I, perhaps fifteen? I knew Michel had enjoyed the favors of girls and women. He was bigger than most men. I had seen him swimming in the Bayou St. John, and I knew his body. He was broad and thick, his arms were brown and violent and tense. Webs of veins lay upon his forearms when he turned them up to the sky and called upon God to bless his swimming hole. He joked that he was John the Baptist, but I believe now that it was not much of a joke. He had a beard before he was sixteen.
He was an outcast in his own home, among his family. He had grown up outside, very rarely and briefly allowed inside, never walked on their worn rugs or sipped from their glass. He took his meals on their back stoop and studied his letters and Scripture by lamp while battling the mosquitoes and moths and beetles drawn to him. His father, the sweet and jolly clerk, believed in sin and the personification of sin, and he saw sin in his son. He saw sin in a son who had been four years old when he was first exiled to the yard. The father had been afraid of the son, afraid of contamination. His wife believed it, too, though she always took great care with the food she set out on the back step, and found the best tent available once Michel outgrew the lean-to. Now the son was bigger than the father and could force himself upon the household if he liked, but he chose to stay outside. When it rained, there was always the church.
I should have known not to trifle with him in that alcove, or to call on the Holy Mother in his presence. I knew better, but I was also a young woman who wanted to feel her own force, to see it move about in the world. Michel wanted to join me in my bed, and I wanted to make him suffer for it. My mistake was thinking that my bed, or more likely the little clearing in back of the church property, was the only destination he had in mind.
“You’ll have to catch me.” I said this knowing that he had no horse and wouldn’t know how to ride one if he had managed to steal one. He had very little, Michel did.
“I will.”
I rode off expecting that the next time I saw Michel would be at Sunday Mass.
It was October, I remember that because the oaks were beginning to turn and the air was clean and light and sharp. The mosquitoes and june bugs were gone, and I could ride as hard as I wanted and not feel them against my face, only the cool, moist air. I clattered past Creole families lounging on broad porches, and American families sitting down to suppers of cold chicken and biscuits steaming and covered in lace. In the twilight so much was clear, I thought I could see through walls.
I was agitated. I was not used to thinking of a boy’s body on mine, I was not accustomed to my curves or the hot, nervous sweetness of imagining a man fitted to those curves—the hard and violent desires. I suppose I rode longer because I was thrilled by the knowledge of desire, if not by the particular boy doing the desiring. I had no interest in Michel Martin. He was my childhood friend, the image of him thrashing about upon me only made me laugh. But the idea of such thrashing, in general, would not leave me be.
I rode into the backswamp, taking my paths, spying the stars through the branches. Venus hung just over the treetops, Jupiter seemed to be running away, off to the south. I could smell the sweet rot, the heaviness of the forest air, as if the trees were breathing out the fine dust of bark and dirt and leaves and dark swamp tea. I went deeper along the paths, deeper than usual. I let the branches reach out to me and stroke my cheeks and batter my arms. One caught my blouse and pulled it open at the neck. The wind cooled me and my blouse billowed behind me. I untucked it. Squirrels raced me through the understory, shouting at me to go back, go back. I came across the campfire.
A dwarf and a thin, tall boy sat on rotted logs. I skittered into their camp, which had been pitched without much thought across a well-traveled path and not off the trail far into the underbrush. They looked up at me over their spitting, smoking, wet fire. At their feet lay old canvas laundry bags filled with what little they had chosen to take with them, each bearing a rough cross in blue paint. It was a dream, I thought. The tall boy smiled sweetly when he rose to his feet. His head was perfectly round and poorly clipped. He had bald spots, as if he’d tried to cut his own hair. The dwarf’s hair was blond and similarly haphazard. I dismounted and saw that he was tall as my waist and possessed of great and powerful hands. He scowled at me and balled those hands as if to strike.
“Pardon me,” I said. “Do you know you are camped on the path?”
“Why are you here?” said the dwarf. “Leave us alone. Who sent you?”
“I ride this path often. You’re in my way.”
He had huge blue eyes and a stub nose. He’d lost one bottom tooth, which made him seem even more feral. Every bit of him was belligerent and tense and ready to spring.
“Rintrah, stand down,” the taller one said. “She’s just a girl.”
“She looks like a novice to me. Sent by the nuns.”
The tall boy picked up a dented old coffeepot that had been sitting in the fire. Inside it they had been boiling roots and onions. He offered me some, as if I’d come calling. He looked dumb, like a man who couldn’t imagine harm coming to him, but I watched him inspecting the woods behind me, his eyes calmly moving side to side, and I knew he could take care of himself.
“Please, eat.”
“I’m not hungry, but thank you.”
The dwarf called Rintrah circled me.
“Yeah, she’s rich. You can smell it.”
“No you can’t,” the taller boy said.
“Yes I can.”
It had been nearly a year since I’d run across travelers in the backswamp. And these two were unusual, even for travelers. They looked well fed, though I wasn’t sure how far they’d get on roots and onions. They carried identical bags. I’d seen those bags before, or bags like them.
“You come from an orphanage,” I said.
“We come from the loving embrace of our mothers, first,” said the tall boy.
“You don’t even know who your mother is, or which one of your parents was colored. How would you know?” The dwarf spoke quickly, and then realized he’d given away the truth to me. He glared in my direction again.
Paschal ignored Rintrah.
“My name is Paschal Girard, and it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”
I knew the trouble they were in, at least out there in the darkening swamp. They needed to get off the p
ath, they needed to hide, they needed to know that the next person to run across them would not be a curious rich girl with a fondness for runaways and a fast horse. The swamp was where the men and women who could not live among humans lived, the murderers and pimps and houdou soul snatchers and slave stealers and highwaymen and the insane. The swamp protected all sorts, not just orphans.
“I will go for some more food, Paschal Girard. You should put out this fire and scatter it. Hide over there”—I pointed to the left, near an old cypress—“and wait for me. I will be back. But get off the path.”
Rintrah had snuck around behind me and the horse and now leaped up out of the darkness to take the reins. He was quick and strong, and soon he was atop the horse. His legs stuck out and he had a devil of a time maintaining control of the horse.
“She was going to run for the constables, Paschal!” Rintrah shouted. “I knew it, we can’t let her leave.”
Paschal, who now looked obviously and instantly colored to me, poked around at the coals of the fire, spreading them out with an elaborately carved stick I hadn’t seen before. A snake, in relief, wound its way up the cane and bared its fangs from the handle. It was painted red and black like the stuffed coral snakes wound up on our mantel at home, souvenirs of my father’s youthful escape to Mexico. The boy watched the sparks float up into the trees. Some of them, by some miracle conspiracy of breezes, rose up through the canopy and into the air above the trees, yellow among cold white stars. He watched them, and I thought I saw him speak to them.
“She wasn’t going to tell anyone, Rintrah,” he said.
“How do you know? She got no use for men like us, people like her would rather people like us stay in our cells.”
“It’s not true,” I said.
“I know,” Paschal said. “Get off the horse, Rintrah. Give it to the lady.”
My horse didn’t much like the odd little man fidgeting on her back, and so she began walking sideways around the fire pit, running him through a gauntlet of old cypress branches. Rintrah spit out the fine cypress leaves that lodged in his teeth, but he refused to give up his mount. Finally my horse gave up and stood at the diminishing fire like one of the rest of us, fascinated by the glowing coals and the dancing sparks.
“I’ll bring you food, candy, whatever you want,” I said. “I’ve done this before.”
“Oh ho! She’s done this before!” shouted Rintrah, dutifully dismounting from the horse, which meant hanging on to the saddle, like a man clinging to the side of a ship, until he’d summoned the courage to fall to the ground. He dusted himself off. “I wonder how many poor fellas are in chains right now because of this girl. She’s a hunter, don’t make no mistake. I know the white people, Paschal, and she’s a killer. She’ll send us to the prison!”
Paschal just nodded, and then slapped Rintrah playfully across the back of his head. “We would be grateful for such a gift, but we would never expect such a thing. Perhaps it’s best just to let you go on home and out of these woods. Lord, I didn’t know they were so dark.”
I walked toward the horse.
“We will meet you at the old, bent cypress you picked out. Please don’t tell anyone else, and don’t bring anyone with you.”
I mounted.
“And hurry,” Paschal said. “I’m scared of this place.”
“Not me,” said Rintrah, burning me with his eyes.
“Yes you are,” Paschal said.
I rode off fast, urging the horse on and wiping the sweat from her beautiful neck. I bent over to avoid the branches. They were two boys running away from the nuns. They were well fed, they didn’t seem terrified of what was behind them in the city like so many others I’d discovered in the woods. Perhaps they weren’t running from anything in particular, but running to something. They were orphans. Some days I thought there wasn’t a soul in the entire city who wasn’t a cousin of mine, or married to a cousin, or in love with a cousin. I had no earthly idea what it would be like to be alone, no faces floating past to remind you of yourself. Of course I had wished I was an orphan on those days when every single thing I did or said registered with a member of the family who, pardonnez, thought my parents should know what their darling had done, for her own sake, no? But those two looked tired and resigned. As much as Rintrah had pretended he didn’t need me, I had seen his eyes widen at the idea of real food.
I left the horse up the block, tied to a rigid plane tree, and snuck into the house. Thank God for thick rugs. Father had a cigar and a visitor in the library, and I could see him through a crack in the door as I glided past. The negroes are human, friend, no mistake. That doesn’t make me a nigger lover. There’s nothing about being human that inherently recommends itself to me. I dislike most humans. Dirty grunting animals. I see no reason to burn them in their homes, though. Yes, yes, I know you had nothing to do with that. But it’s not good for business, you must agree with that.
Chocolates and a bit of dried pork shoulder, into the bag. Day-old bread. Blankets from the stable. I packed them tight in a tack bag. In the darkness every cricket and moth screamed at me, begged me to stop. Go on upstairs, comb your hair, read something, fall asleep atop the lace coverlet, so cool. Mother flipped the pages of her prayer book upstairs, always looking for the perfect prayer, never too long or too specific. I watched her through the window.
Back on the horse, I rode calmly back to the woods, not wanting to draw attention. I avoided the puddles that pushed up against the banquettes, afraid of the sound of the splash and the telltale wet trail behind. No one could follow me, they must not. They could be killed, or taken prisoner. I suppose I always thought that the negro families knew what they were doing, those who had made the swamp their rabbit hole, into which they would disappear and emerge free on the other side. I thought of them as born for escape, bred for escape, raised in the art of escape. I imagined that all negroes knew the way out, and all of them were marking time for their chance. But two orphans? They would never make it.
I heard the sound behind me but ignored it. Could have been a possum or coon. Leaves scraped against leaves, twigs cracked. The boys waited for me at the bent cypress. There was no time to indulge fear of the dark woods and its unfathomable sounds. Twigs cracked, the forest breathed, there was nothing to fear. A sweet lie.
I left the horse just off the path and walked the last stretch through the tripping underbrush. The bag became heavy, I could smell the pork swaddled in canvas. I would die of hunger, I thought.
Something scraped a branch and I hurried the last few feet. Paschal and Rintrah sat with their backs to the trunk of the tree, on opposite sides as if they’d been fighting. Rintrah was the first to his feet, his nose in the air, a smile cracking his face.
“Ham, pig, pork. Yes, yes, yes.”
Paschal told him to hush and grabbed the bag. I was surprised by this. He snatched it and twisted my arm a little. His face was stone, he didn’t look at me. Rintrah praised me as a princess, a goddess, a seraphim of the highest order. He would write me songs, he said, and he began to make up words on the spot. His voice was low and resonant. Paschal grabbed him by the arm and shook him.
“We must leave, brother.”
“But the chocolates?”
Paschal was already walking into the dark.
“This is rude, brother. Are you a gentleman or are you not? Because you blather on about the ways of gentlemen, and I have to tell you that you bore me with that talk, but I tolerate it, because I love you, brother, but now I know you have been wasting your breath and my time. Bring those chocolates!”
Now I heard it. I heard it clearly. Or rather, now I recognized it. Paschal had heard it and had disappeared. Rintrah had not heard it, or could not hear it over the sound of his delight. The colored boy will make it, but not the dwarf, I thought. The twigs snapped in rhythm, the leaves whispered across something broad and fast. Footsteps, a body shoving the forest out of its way.
“Hide, Rintrah. Hide! Now!”
“What?”
I had been followed. The beast crashed through the small clearing and on into the underbrush that had closed behind Paschal. Rintrah tried to climb the tree but fell. He whirled angrily, looking for something. There was Paschal’s stick, and he took it up like a snake handler. I thought he would run the other way, but no: he marched after the beast. I was alone in the clearing.
There were shouts and thuds, curses and the wet slaps of fists. The beast roared and the others whimpered. I felt the trees shake, but it was only my own shoulders. I hugged them until they were still. My horse wandered off slowly, easily. I didn’t go after her and I didn’t go after Rintrah and Paschal, the lost boys. I stood waiting.
It was Michel, feral and massive, bent on murder. He dragged the two back to our tree, deposited them on the ground, and began to speak quietly.
“Which one of these things is yours, Anna Marie?”
He had followed me from the church, on foot. He would never have found me had I not gone home. Stupid. I was contagious, I had brought pain.
“Michel, stop this.”
“It’s the tall one, isn’t it?”
Michel struck out with his boot, sharp at the toe, and buried it between Paschal’s ribs. The boy couldn’t breathe, but he would not look away from Michel, either. He stared at him, passively, and this enraged Michel. He kicked him again, and then lifted him up by his throat. It was like watching a cat maul a piece of string.
Rintrah had lost the snake stick. Tears of blood ran down from below his eyes where he had been cut. I tried to go to him but Michel held me back. Rintrah watched him paw me and got to his feet.
“I’ll kill you,” he said.
He ran at Michel and ducked a flying foot. He hit Michel in his privates and Michel howled before dropping Paschal and knocking Rintrah to the ground. Rintrah stayed down. I tried to go to him again, and Michel pushed me back.
“What is it about this one, Anna Marie?” he said, pushing Paschal back against the tree.
