Nowhere Is a Place
Page 9
Secure and confident in sunup and sundown and everything that fell between, but not at all prepared for Henry Vicey stepping through the door, sheepish grin in place, a flick of the hand sending the other slaves shuffling outside. Except Buena. He jumps up, grins, says, “Afternoon, Massa.”
Henry ignores him, walks right past him and straight to Lou.
“How you doing there, Lou?” he says, heavy boots walking across the floor, tiny cabin shaking, cold chill where hot air had been hanging.
“Fine,” Lou says, and moves the baby from one arm to the other. She wants him to see her, see that she ain’t his.
Two other men come in, heavy boots; dirty, caked mud falls off their heels as they step in.
“How do,” Buena says, voice uneven and then surprised when he recognizes one of the faces. “Mr. Oswald?” Face breaking into pieces of confusion, throat bulging with questions he ain’t allowed to ask.
“Buena,” Oswald says without looking at him. The other man eye him, though, sums him up slowly, deliberately.
“She sure is a fine baby,” Henry says, stepping a little closer, making sure he can’t see any of himself in the child Lou holds.
“Yassa, thank you.”
“Uhm,” Henry moans, looking over his shoulder at Oswald and the stranger before looking back at Lou and asking, “Can I hold her?”
Lou can’t see Buena, can’t find his eyes to know if this is right or even real. “Sir?” She feigns hard of hearing.
Henry took a breath and reached out to Lou. “Hand her over, Lou,” he said, and his face went red.
“Massa . . . Mr. Oswald, sir, what’s going on here?” Buena’s voice was full of fear now, so full that it lapped against the walls like water.
The stranger pushed his jacket aside and turned to Buena so that he could see quite clearly the leather and the gun it held.
“Give her here, Lou,” Henry said again, and then his hands were on the baby tugging her from Lou’s gripping fingers. Lou never said no, not out loud, but her head shook back and forth as she tried to hang on to Nayeli—it shook back and forth until the baby cried out in pain and Lou let go.
“Massa, what you think you doing?” Buena screamed. Then a stool tumbled over and the tiny shack shook so hard Lou thought the walls would fall in on them, and there was the sound of the stranger’s gun being cocked and Oswald saying, “This here completes your sale, Buena.” Then they all turned and walked out.
Buena hollered, right there on the floor where the stranger had knocked him down and brandished a gun in his face. He curled himself into a ball and screamed like they were pulling Nayeli out of him instead of just carrying her away from him.
Lou just sat there staring down at her empty hands. She had nothing left to let go of.
She’d left quite a bit of herself in the valley, and another chunk on the floor in the pantry, and now the rest of her was gurgling and squirming in the arms of a white man.
She had nothing to let go of, but something new to hold on to.
The “This”—Oswald had spoken.
“This?”
Inanimate, without life, no mother, no father—wood, maybe, a stone, a cow chip. Those things were a this, a that, and an it. Not her daughter, not her sweet Nayeli.
She closed her empty hands, and a hollow laugh escaped her. Lou foolishly thought that the first cut was the deepest, the most damaging—losing her parents, her brothers—but this, her child ripped from her as she suckled . . .
Lou knew then the first cut is not the deepest; it’s just a sample of the deeper ones yet to come.
* * *
Buena is not the same.
He withers into something that is bent and shuffling with eyes that hardly ever reach for the sky.
Nothing can ever be the same again, not even their love for each other.
Lou says nothing, but her eyes accuse him. Maybe if her name was different. Maybe if you’d never come on that wagon and caught sight of me. Maybe if we both were never born.
She says nothing, but her body pulls back when he climbs on top of her and presses his flesh against hers. It pulls back but something stick and, less than a year later, Lou is standing in the slow flow of the stream at the point where it is the clearest, where the sun seems to swim, and thinking for the umpteenth time about killing herself and her twin boys.
One strapped to her back, the other cradled in her arms. Identical twins dug in deep after the tears dried up and her body began to yield to his again and they were all the other had left to cling to.
A mother again, Lou watches the road for wagons, though Henry had assured her, “You don’t have to worry; nobody taking these two from you. They yours and here to stay.”
They weren’t hers and she knew they weren’t here to stay. They could be gone with a blink of an eye.
Lou had to protect herself against the next cut and so she looked on her sons as the white people did. Thinking of Jeff and Jim as this and that, as chattel; it was less painful that way.
That was June, and by late autumn April is back home, mourning the death of her husband and feeding her misery with cakes and pies.
Nothing much different from what she did before she was gone; she’s just wearing black now.
Henry is so happy, he’s bursting. A hundred acres of land has just fallen in his lap. A house, three slaves. He can hardly contain himself, and heads off to town and the local saloon to blow smoke and talk loud about all he has. But unbeknownst to him, twenty-five acres and two slaves will soon disappear when Charlie Lessing turns his cards over to reveal three aces.
___________________
By the time Jeff and Jim are two years old, Lou and Buena realize that as identical as they are, they are more like night and day than mirror images.
Jeff was the first to walk, to run, to talk, while Jim crawled until he was almost twenty months old, and didn’t cut a tooth until his second birthday. Talking was a chore for him and so he pointed his way through questions and answers while his eyes remained vacant and muddied.
His debt mounting, Henry Vicey had mortgaged all of the land and most of the chattel, leaving just four adult slaves and the twins.
April was bedridden, ulcers eating through her legs, and soon bedsores covered her back and buttocks because Verna still would not allow a strong black male hand to touch her daughter, not even to turn her. Meanwhile, all of the women together couldn’t even budge her, so she remained on her back, like a beached whale.
* * *
“I tell you what: I’ll take it all off of your hands and let you remain on.”
“Remain on?” Henry tried to focus his bleary eyes on Charlie Lessing, a tall, broad-shouldered man with piercing green eyes and thin blond hair.
“Whatya mean, remain on?” He slurred as he lifted the shot glass of whiskey to his lips.
“I mean, I’ll pay off all of your debts and let you stay on the land and in your house.”
“Whaaaaat?” The whiskey burned his throat, and his tongue quivered.
“Sharecropper,” Charlie said, and tilted the whiskey bottle for the umpteenth time.
Henry straightened his back and slapped the bottle from Charlie’s grasp. The other men in the saloon abruptly stopped their conversations and turned their attention to the two men who had been huddled at the corner table for most of the night.
Henry leapt from his chair, sending it tumbling noisily to the floor. “No Vicey man has ever sharecropped no land. We’s owners. We’s kings!” he bellowed, and slapped at his chest.
Charlie just smirked, reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out a silver coin, and tossed it to the barmaid who was quickly clearing away the broken pieces of glass.
Henry stood swaying and patting the empty pockets of his pants.
Charlie called for another bottle of whiskey as he stood and righted Henry’s chair. “Sit down, Henry,” he said before taking his own seat again.
Henry plopped down into the chair.
Henry said nothing. His eyes were on the young mulatto girl who was curled up in the lap of a man who reminded Henry of who he had been before that day.
Strong, confident, a ladies’ man. He shook his head in remembrance.
Charlie followed Henry’s eyes across the room. “She is something, ain’t she?”
Henry nodded.
“Go on, Henry. It’ll be on me. Sometimes it takes the arms of a woman to make a man think straight.”
Henry licked his lips.
“Go on,” Charlie urged.
___________________
Henry was supposed to drive them.
Henry was no longer “Massa” now, just a piece of poor white trash. Common labor. A sharecropper. An overseer.
He was supposed to drive them, but he spent most of his time drinking in the back of his wagon or underneath the shade of a tree. When his bottle was empty he’d try to bury his misery between his wife’s breasts, but she had stopped allowing him into her bed. So now he took his misery and the few coins he had, and found some whore to lay on top of.
Charlie Lessing was “Massa” now and had a hundred men come in and clear the land three hundred feet behind the Vicey home.
He would build a mansion—a grand home that would match the one he owned in Myanmar, where he lived with his wife Anne Marie and their children. This house, though, would house his mistress, Delia Hampton—a fiery buxom vixen with a forked tongue, wild black hair, and jagged sapphires for eyes.
The house was completed in a year. Lessing had men working night and day. The constant banging, sawing, and raucous behavior of the men frayed Verna’s nerves. She couldn’t sleep at night, and during the day all she could do was stand and watch that magnificent structure bloat and rise up into the sky, casting a mocking shadow over her scant saltbox of a home. It was more than Verna could stand.
She hated Lessing and his house, she thought as she turned away from the window and her eyes fell on her husband who was sitting half-dazed and still caught in the vestiges of the previous night’s drunken stupor.
Their eyes met and Henry muttered, “What?”
Verna just scowled at him and stormed out of the room.
Yes, Verna hated Lessing with all his money and smart business sense, but she hated her husband more.
* * *
“I don’t want to go.”
“But Verna, what will we look like if we don’t attend?”
“What will it look like if we do? Fools!”
Henry stood in front of the mirror wrestling with his tie. “Well, we’re going and that’s that.”
It was all Verna could do to control her anger when she and Henry arrived for the grand unveiling party Charlie was having for the mansion.
Double wraparound porches, main hall with marble floors and oak moldings . . .
“This banister is carved from a two-hundred-year-old African mahogany tree,” Charlie pointed out to his guests.
The insistent “oohing” and “aahing” was more than Verna thought she could take, and so she pressed her kerchief against her mouth to keep from screaming.
There was a humongous crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the entry hall as well as in the parlor, the library, the drawing room, and the dining room.
“Twenty slaves to staff the house,” someone whispered.
“Twenty-three, to be exact,” Charlie laughed as he led his guests up the curvaceous staircase and to the first of six bedrooms.
By the time Verna saw the third bathroom, she was dizzy.
“It takes twenty buckets of water to fill this tub,” Charlie said proudly as he glided his hand across the rim of the copper tub.
“Oh my. That’s a lot of boiling to do,” someone said.
“Yes, I suppose. But we have two cast-iron stoves.”
A sigh of surprise.
Finger sandwiches. Wine. A violinist and pianist. Verna swore if she heard the statements “How lovely,” “How beautiful,” or “Simply magnificent” ever again, she would kill herself.
* * *
The shame was complete. Verna was the wife of a nobody. How would she ever live down the disgrace? Where would she go? Her parents had been dead for years. Her mind whirled as they made their way home.
“Verna?” Henry’s voice squeaked when the wagon came to a stop and she leapt off. “Verna?” Henry called to her again, but she just kept walking.
“Bastard,” she whispered under her breath as her hands grabbed hold of the door handle. The screen slammed back on its rusty hinges, shuddered, and then fell to the ground.
I will not live like this, Verna thought to herself as she paced in circles around her bedroom. The laughter from the party members sailed down off the hill and settled into the space around her. It bellowed in her mind and she imagined that they were all laughing at her.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror. When did her face become so lined? She stepped closer. Her skin looked like parchment paper. When did her hair start to turn gray?
And then she heard it, like a blowing horn in the corner of her mind: “Oh, isn’t this house just amazing!”
It wasn’t the word lovely, beautiful, or magnificent—none she promised herself to take her life on—but amazing was close enough, and she knew for as long as she remained in that house, on that land, she would never stop hearing those declarations. And so she went to the closet and pulled out the only rifle her husband still owned, checked the chamber for bullets, and then walked slowly to her daughter’s room.
“Mother, is it as wonderful as everyone is saying it is?” April asked enthusiastically, lifting her heavy head as far up as her thick neck would allow.
“Yes it is, darling. It is.” And with that, Verna raised the shotgun and blew her daughter’s bright eyes right out of her head.
Route 40
Bricktown was nice, sorry to leave it. Sherry say, Maybe we can stay again, on the way back.
Sure, sounds good to me. I ain’t got no job, no small children, no place to go but home. What about you, ain’t you got something and somebody to get back to?
Sherry let out a heavy sigh, fiddle with the radio knob, and stare out at the car in front of us.
I watch her from the corner of my eye.
Ain’t you got a boyfriend?
Sherry’s body flinch a bit, she say, We going back down this road again?
A girlfriend, then? I say, and prepare myself for the worst.
Sherry turn her head a bit toward me and say, I got plenty of girlfriends.
You know what I mean.
No, I don’t.
I think, Why it always got to be a fight, then I say out loud, You gay?
A noise come out her mouth that sound like a laugh and a cough all mixed up together, and then she say, Hell no!
I feel a little relief.
But there is somebody, right?
Uh-huh, she say, and a little smile dance across her lips.
I seen that smile before, feel despair come over me, say, He white?
Sherry face go dark, she shake her head no, grip the steering wheel tighter, and say, Get the book from the backseat and read what I wrote last night.
I watch her. He’s black, then?
Can you please just read?
She annoyed now. Shit, I’m annoyed too, and reach back and snatch the book from the seat and begin flipping the pages hard so she knows that I’m annoyed. I huff, stare at the words, and then start moving them across my mind.
* * *
When I’m done I’m breathless. I don’t know what to say. I close the book and clutch my heart and then my head and check to see if there’s a hole between my own eyes. Beca
use it’s lit up there, on fire. I look for blood on my hands.
You okay, Dumpling? she asks, and I say, She killed her baby and herself. I didn’t think she would do it.
Well she did, Sherry say, and switches lanes.
She did it ’cause you wrote it that way, I say, even though something inside of me believes that she really did.
I say, This is getting too serious. I don’t know if I can take any more. Maybe we should stop.
Sherry turn her head and give me a hard look. We’ll stop when we get to the end, she say, and I wonder, What end? And then I think, Whose end?
___________________
Naples ran screaming from the house, her crude braids stiff and at attention atop her head as she tore down the front steps, frantically waving her bright blue head-scarf in the air.
“Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!” she cried, streaking past a startled Henry who was still seated, openmouthed atop the wagon.
Henry couldn’t seem to move; he just sat gaping at the house, so Buena Vista went inside to investigate, and when he came out, bloody footprints followed him down the steps and into the dirt clearing where the slaves huddled together waiting.
“They dead. Both of them,” he said, looking up at Henry.
Henry’s face went slack and then his eye moved slowly over the land his family had owned for generations before him. His lips trembled, but no one could hear a word of what he mumbled.
“Mr. Vicey?” Buena Vista took a few steps closer.
Henry’s eyes slowly found him; they were ringed red and puffed. His bottom lip sagged now, and a slow tic climbed up the right side of his face.
Buena Vista continued, “Missus and the daughter are dead.”
Henry said nothing, just snapped the horse reins and cried, “Hi-ya!”