by Daren Wang
Leander said nothing as the man ran a straight razor over his stubbled throat. He nearly fell when he got up from the chair, so the barber took the last of his money and gave him a fancy walking stick another customer had left behind.
Leander made his way back to the train station and waited for hours before he caught the local. It was only twenty miles to Town Line and he sat in the hard wooden seats watching the silvered summer fields under the full moon.
Hans came to him just as the train passed through his own rye field. His friend stood in front of him, shaking his head and staring at the ground. Leander’s knuckles whitened on the silver-topped stick as the brakes squealed and the train lurched to a stop at the Town Line station. He mopped sweat from his face and straightened himself.
The engineer called for water, and as Leander walked up the aisle, he could see a crewman climb onto the tower to fill the engine’s reservoir.
On the platform, he watched as a man in the shadow of the ticket booth gestured silently toward another slipping from the baggage car. Leander recognized his old friend and smiled broadly.
“Harry, it’s me,” he shouted.
For a long moment, nothing answered his call other than the summer cicadas.
“Son of a bitch,” Harry bellowed and broke from the shadows. Before Leander knew what was happening, Harry was on him, knocking him to the ground, slamming his head onto the platform. Bursts of light flashed in Leander’s eyes and he felt like he was going to black out. A skein of hatred flashed across Harry’s face as he landed punch after punch. Leander rolled onto his side, curled into a ball, and brought his hands up to shield his face. He let out a wail when Harry’s knee slammed into his lower back.
“Leave him alone,” a voice shouted. Through the grunting of the men around him, Leander could hear the cocking of guns.
Leander uncovered his face to see half a dozen Union soldiers with pistols standing on the platform.
“This ain’t your business,” Harry said, still straddling Leander.
“Can’t you see the man’s dying?” the officer asked.
“It’s about goddamned time.” Harry spat. “That uniform don’t mean shit around here. Get the hell back on that train. This is Town Line. We quit the Union long ago.”
The officer laughed. “This is that seceded little jerkwater?” he said. “I’ve been meaning to come out here and burn you sons of bitches to the ground.”
He turned and looked at the soldiers standing in line, pistols at the ready.
“What do you think, boys, can we find some kerosene in this shithole full of traitors?”
“Yes, sir,” said one of the men.
The officer smiled as he swung his boot and caught Harry in the chin, knocking him backward.
Harry scrambled off the platform and ran into the night.
“Draft-dodging hayseeds,” the officer said, helping Leander to his feet and brushing him off. “Goddamned cowards, attacking a gentleman like that.”
“I’m not dying,” Leander said, pushing the soldier away with shaking hands.
“If you say so,” the officer said as he brushed the dirt from Leander’s rumpled suit.
“All aboard,” the conductor shouted at the soldiers.
The soldiers piled back on, leaving Leander standing on the platform alone.
He gripped the silver of the walking stick and hobbled through the quiet crossroads and up the highway to the farm. The walk, less than a mile, left him exhausted.
The house was dark except for an orange glow in Mary’s room. He stopped at the foot of the steps and gathered himself, straightening his suit and running his fingers through his pomaded hair. He spat into his handkerchief, wiped the blood from his split lip, and climbed onto the porch. The door was locked.
He knocked, softly at first, and then, as if it was Fuller himself standing before him, he began to pound the smooth red surface with his shaking hands.
It felt like hours before Mary opened the door, and when she did, he hardly recognized her. Her face had taken on a sternness, and her eyes had hardened. Even in the lamplight, he could see a few strands of gray in her straw-colored hair, but she stood taller with a confidence that reminded him of their father.
“Let me in,” he said. “This is my house.”
A look of recognition played across her face, and her eyes welled. He moved toward her, but she backed away and the hardness in her face returned. He could see the muscles twist as she clenched her jaw, and then the door was closed again.
He pounded on the unyielding wood, and then, in a moment of fury, he wound up like a batsman and struck the door, splintering the stick and leaving a dent in the wood his father had milled fifty years before.
“Mine!” he screamed into the night.
Something in his chest collapsed and he fell against the door. He slid down until his face pressed against the cool, wide planks of the porch. The world spun and he felt like his blood and breath was draining from him, seeping through the cracks in the wood and into the soil below. His body convulsed.
“Mercy,” he whispered as he fell still at last. “Dear God, have mercy on me.”
He lay that way for a long time before he pulled himself to his feet. His legs felt rubbery, and he held the railing of the porch tightly as he slid down to sit on the steps. He leaned into the post, his fingers finding the place he’d scratched his name as a little boy. He stared through the dark into the familiar landscape.
Voices came to him through the night air, the sound of men together, laughing and joking. Somewhere behind the house. He gathered himself and tottered down the driveway.
A group of black men sat around the firepit that he’d shared with his family so many times. He braced himself against the river stone foundation of the barn as his knees nearly buckled under him. He recognized the runaway that he had betrayed so long before, and stifled a gasp, afraid they would hear him, afraid of what they’d do to him.
Leander wondered how he could still be here when so much else had changed.
“So this book with the shed by the pond?” one of the others was asking. “Why is it I’m supposed to live in the middle of the woods?”
“No, no, it’s not about the shed itself,” Joe answered.
He had his finger on a page in a book, and another man, shoulder to shoulder with him, was trying to read it in the firelight.
“This man that built this little place,” Joe said. “He says it’s about being your own man, being free. If the people around you aren’t doing things right, you should just leave, and do right for yourself. He is saying that when things aren’t just, aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, you should fight them by not being part of it.”
“He was living in the woods,” the first one said. “He probably didn’t have any money.”
“No, he had the money,” Joe said. “His family owned a pencil factory. It wasn’t about the money.”
“It’s always about the money,” the other one said, and the others laughed. “Isn’t there an easier book to learn from?”
The men fell silent then. One was popping corn in a metal basket over the fire and the aroma intertwined with the sweet smoke of applewood.
The cook withdrew the long-handled basket from the fire, and opened the metal lid with his bare fingers. He offered the snow-white kernels to each man around the fire, then turned and extended it toward where Leander leaned against the barn.
“You can come out,” he said. “Come sit by the fire.”
Leander tried to raise the strength to run, but the cook smiled and said, “Go ahead, while it’s still hot.”
He stepped forward, reaching out for a handful of the warm, fragrant kernels. He cupped them to his face, drawing the sweet smell deep into his lungs.
Hans was there again, and Leander felt his friend’s hand on his back.
At first, he simply wept as a kernel melted to nothing on his tongue. He struggled to hide his tears, but a wave broke over him, and he fell to
his knees, sobbing again.
Somebody draped a blanket over his shoulders, and one of the men helped him stand and led him to the cabin, where they took his coat and shoes off before putting him on a cornhusk cot. He tried to stop shaking and crying, but he could not control his body.
“I’ve seen this before,” said the one who’d helped him. “He put that poison in his blood. He’s got it bad.”
“Do we need to get the doctor?” another asked.
“There’s only three ways to get through this: more of the same; just dying; or, if he’s lucky, a week or so of sicking it out.”
“Who is he? What’s he doing here?”
“That’s Leander,” Joe said. “Mary’s brother.”
“He’s that one?” the first said. “Son of a bitch, let’s leave him to that wolf.”
“No,” Joe said. “Do what you can for him. I don’t want him on my soul.”
The men all filed into the long cabin and climbed into their bunks.
Leander slipped into a fitful sleep, waking briefly the next morning to the noise of the men readying to head out into the fields.
When he woke again, it was Katia sitting near him.
“You can’t be here,” she said.
He reached for her, but she backed away.
“You can’t be here,” she repeated. “If Harry finds you, he’ll kill you.”
“Harry already got his licks in,” Leander said. “Where’s my father? Can you bring him to me? He will make Mary listen.”
She twisted her hands.
“I will try,” she said. “But you have to go.”
He slipped back into sleep.
His father was sitting on the stool next to him when he woke next. His face was papery white, and his hands were nearly translucent. Katia sat on a bunk behind him.
“Leander, my boy,” Nathan said, his brow furrowed in worry. “Where did they get you? Where’s the bullet?”
“I’m sick, Father,” Leander said.
“Let’s get you fixed up and back out there,” Nathan said. “There’s a mess brewing down there in Pennsylvania. They need you.”
“They don’t want me,” Leander said.
“Want you?” his father said. “What’s that have to do with anything? You’re a lieutenant. You have a duty.”
“That was a long time ago, Father,” Leander said.
“Mary gave me the picture of you in your uniform just the other day,” Nathan said. “When was that, Frances?”
He cocked his head toward an empty bunk.
“You see, not that long ago,” he said.
Leander looked past his father to where Katia sat.
“He has the gift now, too,” Katia whispered. “He hears the voices of those gone.”
Leander stared at the empty bunk, worried that perhaps his own ghosts would appear. There was nothing but dust motes floating in the afternoon sun.
“I’ve come home to run the farm,” Leander said. “Like you told me to. But Mary won’t let me in.”
Nathan’s face clouded.
“Mary’s in charge now,” he said.
“But you always said the farm would be mine,” Leander said.
Nathan patted him on the shoulder.
“Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “I’ve never seen the farm run better. I know your heart was never in it. Lord knows I could tell. I shouldn’t have forced you like I did. Now Mary has it running like it never did before. You just need to get yourself back with your friends. Mary told me how you all rode downtown together, you in front of them all. I wish I’d been there to see it.”
“It was a mistake, Pa,” Leander said, starting to sob. “I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have done any of it. They all died.”
Leander’s face collapsed in pain and he struggled to get the words out. His father stared at him in confusion, but his eyes were soft.
“Hans died. Because of me. They’re all gone. Hans is gone.”
He reached a quivering hand toward his father.
Nathan went to his knees next to the bed and took his son in his arms.
“I’ve been so wrong.” Leander wept. “I’ve been so wrong. You’ve got to forgive me. Someone has got to forgive me. Someone has to. Something has to.”
Leander held onto his father. Even now, he could feel the strength that had always been there. Nathan patted him on the back, whispering, “You’re a good boy,” over and over again until Leander had cried himself to exhaustion.
Katia and his father helped him lie down in the bed again and his father straightened his blanket, tucking him in like he was a little boy, then he straightened up and ran his fingertips over the rough wood of an overhead beam.
“I still have the old adze I used to cut this,” he said. “When I came west, this cabin was the first thing I built. I was your age. That’s when my life started. I forget just about everything before that. None of it seems to matter.”
He opened the door and stepped into the daylight.
Katia had left a tray of food for him on the bedside table and he emptied the bowl of succotash quickly, then wolfed down the square of cornbread. It was different than any he’d had since he’d left home. There was maple sugar instead of cane, and less of it than others would use. He knew that his sister’s hand had made it. He licked the crumbs from his fingertips.
The milk tasted of the farm’s rich black earth and he savored it as if it were a Margaux.
The food stayed in him, the first since New York. He dozed again and woke to the sound of the house bell tolling three times, signaling the workers to come out of the fields for dinner.
Leander could hear men in the barnyard joking as they washed off the day’s grime in the rain barrel. When two men came in and saw him there, they became as quiet as visitors at a wake and left quickly.
Eventually, the yard outside the cabin hushed as the men left together for the evening meal.
Leander gathered himself. He was weak, but his legs didn’t wobble like they had before. He stood, hands on the doorway, and looked up into the front yard.
Two crowded tables sat in the red light of the evening sun. As he watched, Mary came out of the house and added a bowl mounded with potato salad to the ample food. Even so far away, Leander could smell the fried chicken and boiled corncobs. After Mary sat, his father motioned with his hand and the food began to be passed.
Leander stepped into the yard and leaned on the barn as he watched the whole meal. His belly was still full from the food Katia had left, but he felt hungry in a way he hadn’t in years.
Even after the pie dishes were cleared, the men lingered, talking of their plans for going downtown the next day.
His father spoke little, but laughed with them sometimes.
As each man stood to leave, he would first nod to Mary, then stop at the head of the table and lay a gentle hand on their father’s shoulder or arm, as if the contact was some form of mutual blessing.
As the men headed in Leander’s direction, he slipped into the barn to avoid them.
Inside, there was little light, but he knew his way through the old building by feel. He ran his hands along the worn places and listened to the familiar creak of old planks underfoot and the rustle of the animals settled in for the night.
He remembered a childhood adventure and dug in a corner by the pigsty, unearthing the treasure of a quarter he’d buried there as a little boy. As then, it was all the money to his name.
He found a barrel of apples and took one for himself and gave another to Timber.
He climbed up the ladder to the loft, piled high with the summer’s hay.
Another ladder led to a hatch and he climbed through it out onto the roof. He settled into the little notch at the peak where he’d sat so many times before, and remembered so many conversations he’d had there with Hans and Harry.
The moon had come up full, and he could see the fireflies floating above the summer fields. He took the apple from his pocket and bit i
nto it. From the rooftop, he could look at the velvet black of the forest stretching to the south and map every path, gully, and spring. Even the rhythm of the crickets sounded right in a way they did nowhere else.
Finally, he climbed down and walked toward the men at the fire.
When Joe saw him approach, he stood and left. The others turned quiet.
“He doesn’t like me much,” Leander said.
“No, he doesn’t,” the popcorn man said. “But that didn’t stop him from giving up his bed for you to sleep in. I’m Palmer.”
Leander felt the weight of the moment he’d betrayed the man, pulling the tarp off the wagon and setting so much in motion, and wondered if he would ever be able to atone.
“Sit,” Palmer said. “He’s just gone for a walk before turning in. He does that a lot.”
Leander took a spot near the fire and stared into the flames.
“I’m Macolm, and you can have my bunk after tonight,” another said. “I’m leaving.”
“Where you going?” Leander asked.
“I’m a private in the Corps de Afrique. The 78th You Ess Cee Tee,” Malcolm said, stretching out each letter. “Riding downtown tomorrow to muster.”
“Don’t get him started,” Palmer said. “It’s like he’s a general or something.”
“I was in the army,” Leander said. “It was the hardest thing I ever did.”
“I was a slave,” Malcolm said. “That wasn’t much fun, either.”
The other men laughed and Leander turned red-faced in embarrassment.
“After Old Man Goggins and his whip, there ain’t nothing the U.S. Army can throw at me that I can’t handle,” Malcolm said with a smile. “I know most of them soldiers don’t give a damn about us. They’re fighting for God and country, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. I just know that I seen my family sold off piece by piece. Me and Palmer, we were the lucky ones. Goggins bought us together, but my momma was sold down the river. God or country don’t mean a lick when you watch your baby sister yanked away from your mama. All these boys on either side can fight for whatever they think they’re fighting for, but the ones fighting on the side of Goggins, those are the ones I’m joining up against. Whatever they want me to do in that cause, I’ll do.”
