by Nick Arvin
The creak sounds again, even louder, becomes a quick shriek, which ends with a sound of detonation. A wide section of roof swings as if on a hinge, a huge strange shape slides through, bleating, and Mother disappears.
Henry stands from the table. What is it, bleating? It sprawls massively on the floor. Henry has the idea that Mother stepped behind it, but he sees she’s not there. She’s underneath it. It is a cow.
Mother’s underneath a cow.
Henry cries out, rears back, punches the cow, hard, on her thick moist nose.
A cow has come over the hill, onto the cabin roof, and fallen through, her big dark empty cow eyes rolling. But why? There’s never been a cow on the roof before. Then he remembers the redcoats, knocking down fences.
Henry punches again, and the cow makes a weird loud croaking noise, thrashes, twists, heaves, rises. To Henry’s outrage, the cow appears unharmed. He swings open the door, punches the cow on the neck to turn her, then again on her rump, to move her. With shivers and lurches, pissing as she goes, she works her way out the door and is gone.
Mother lies on the dirt floor, legs bent one way, head another, body twisted between like rope, eyes open, not stirring. Above her, the roof jaws down. Bark shingles lie scattered around.
Henry gulps a breath. “Get up!” he yells. “Up up up! Stand up! Mother, don’t you lie there, get up!”
She does not move.
Henry sits on the dirt floor. “Up,” he says more softly, in the tone of a recommendation. “Try to get up. Get up.”
Presently he stops speaking, only stares.
He thinks, for a moment, of nothing at all.
Much as if he is also dead.
A breeze sways the cabin door to creak on its leather hinges, and lifts a smell—the smell of Mother’s loosed bowels.
Henry stands. He gets a grip under her arms and with great effort drags her shoulders up onto her bed, lifts her feet in, straightens the twist from her torso. He draws off her dress, then her soiled underclothes. He gazes a moment at her nude slack form. He flings the undergarments out the door, then puts water on a cloth, cleans her, throws the dirty cloth into the yard, puts a blanket over her nakedness. He tries to close her eyes, but they will not stay closed. She seems to stare over his shoulder.
He takes her gingham dress off the floor, twists it in his hands, presses it to his face—it smells of smoke, sweat, earth. He holds it out, considers. She did the washing only a couple of days ago. It looks nice. Mother’s a small woman, and the dress is nearly his own size.
The dress seems to fit rather well.
He peers down at himself in awe. He twitches a little to see how the dress moves, and how the light from the doorway picks out the blue threads.
He minces a couple of steps, but quickly stops. No, this isn’t how Mother moves. He nudges aside fallen shingles and tries again. He lifts his legs in arcs, imitating the sway of her bowlegged step.
He moves to the hearth where the fire is still burning, puts in a log, and jabs it twice with the poker—one of Mother’s mannerisms. A fire, she would say, needs food, like anyone else. He lifts the succotash aside, lids it, takes his bowl off the table, sets it in the soaking bucket. He sways to the water bucket, drinks from the dipper.
When happy, Mother’s mutter ran fast and percussive, a sound like the birds in the trees or the frogs in the swamp, so constant that he could choose at any time to ignore it or to bring it into focus and wonder over it. Sweet-fern tea, she would say, is the best thing for ague. When numbed with palsy, roll a ball of rosemary between your hands. If you have gravel in the urine, juice wild garlic into cider. Onto a filmy eye, blow powder of human dung. For the King’s Evil, take warm ass’s milk. For rabies, eat the liver of a drowned puppy . . .
He sways to the shelf on the wall to straighten things. He takes an armful of shingles off the floor, casts them outside. The chickens pause to cock an eye at him. In the quiet he looks down. Sees himself.
He yanks off the dress and glances left and right: no one has seen him, except the chickens. He rubs the dress between his fingers, feeling the softness. He steps inside, folds the dress, sets it on the table. He picks through variously rusting and damaged tools piled in the corner, takes out a shovel.
Don’t! Mother cries.
Henry stops, bewildered.
Don’t you think of burying me in this filthy swamp dirt!
“Mother?” Henry says.
Motionless on the bed she says, Put away the shovel.
“What I’m going to do,” Henry says, at once confused to hear her, pleased to hear her, and cross to hear what she is saying, “is I’m going to dig a hole, then put you in it.”
I am not meant for the dirt. I want my family, and the sea, as you well know.
“Oh, be quiet!” Henry jabs the shovel at the floor. Maybe the cow was such a surprise that she doesn’t understand she’s dead. “You’re dead!” he informs her. “You shouldn’t argue with me when you’re dead! You’re meant for the worms!” He glares at her. She gazes back. He holds her gaze, swears that he will not be the first to turn away.
You promised to return me to the sea.
“How did I promise? When? Anyhow, that was before you were dead! Now you’re dead, and everything is different!”
And I will have my family around.
“Dead! Dead! Dead! Quiet!” Henry shouts.
I never wanted to go down in the dirt, she says. And you have always known it, because I have always told you. Don’t be indolent and unloving and a betrayer of your own blood and mother.
Henry runs straight out the door with the shovel, scattering the chickens, intending to dig a hole, but he can hear her calling, so he runs into the woods, where, hearing her yet, he drops the shovel and covers his ears, but still hears her nattering. It seems fainter, though. He sets out running.
He runs between the trees of the apple orchard—neglected many years, the weeds and woods growing in, he likes to come here in spring and sit among the blooming trees to listen to the riot of bees. But now the blossoms are gone and the apples still green and hard. He keeps running. He decides to go to the big house that once was his ancestors’ house, now Suthers’s house. He feels doubtful of approaching the elder Suthers sister, because she always disliked Mother—why, Henry didn’t understand. But he might ask one of the slaves, Radnor or Charles or Hollis, for help. Perhaps he can borrow a cart, to transport Mother to the ocean. Perhaps then she will shush.
Ahead, voices.
Not so headlong this time, Henry slows, listens, stops, smells woodsmoke, glimpses the flicker of a fire, steps off the trail, creeps up to Sutherses’ fields. The fields run a wide expanse of many acres with the Sutherses’ house set at the far side and the barn and the slave shacks away in the corner nearest the swamp. The house is two stories and blazing white, but much else shows decay, with several of the slave shacks long abandoned and half of the fields fallow. But in the others grow rows of head-high corn and some beans, turnips, parsnips, cabbages, carrots, beets. Suthers’s business lies in Alexandria, and he rarely spends time at the plantation. It serves to show that he will own a plantation if he wants, and as a place to keep his family out of the way.
The redcoats are setting camp in the fields, with tents already up and cooking fires going. Henry spots the same trio of donkey carts he saw before, and even more soldiers, at least sixty. The redcoats have trampled a great deal of the crop, and many of them roam in and out of the house, carrying rolls of tobacco and bottles of whiskey and wine. Henry wonders if Suthers’s daughters and the slaves have fled. Mary already left weeks ago for Alexandria, disappointing Franklin terribly. Some of the redcoats, well into Suthers’s whiskey, are clapping and yowling like a pack of cats.
A soldier emerges from the house with a chemise on a pole and waves it about, to general applause. Two officers argue over a horse taken from
the barn. One pushes the other in the chest, and they fall to wrestling in the dirt. Another soldier grabs two piglets from the pigpen, slices their throats, then swings the gate and throws rocks to make the others run. They squeal and trot a few steps, then stop, sidle back to the dead pigs, mill about.
A noise behind.
Henry turns too late—a redcoat, girthy as a tanner’s vat, rushes him and gives a tremendous shove. Henry flies backward, lands on his back in the dirt of the field. The fat redcoat runs up, adds a kick in Henry’s stomach, shouting, “Ho! Ho! It’s the one who knocked you onto your arse, Bradley! The scary boy!”
Henry struggles to breathe, works himself to sitting as several soldiers gather and gaze at him. “He didn’t knock me over.” The jug-eared one, Bradley, comes up, puffing. “I tripped, coincidentally.” With him is an officer with a face full of carbuncles and a scarce fuzz on his upper lip. “Look at those mean rat eyes,” Bradley says. “That’s a spy, if I’ve ever seen one. Let’s kill him.”
“I’m no spy,” Henry says.
“Just what a spy would say!” Bradley cries victoriously.
This makes Henry angry. He climbs to his feet, but the kick in his gut hurts so that he can’t straighten and his head throbs. He tumbles over in the dirt. Surprised, he laughs.
“He’s laughing at you, Bradley.”
Bradley glowers. “Let’s poke a bayonet in him and be done.”
“That’s maybe a bit much, isn’t it?” the officer says.
“Spies are to be executed. That’s the King’s law.”
“Well, in that case, maybe a firing squad.”
“I’d like to borrow a cart,” Henry says, “to take my dead mother to the ocean.”
They gawk.
“He is only a boy,” the officer says.
“Kill him before he can spy again,” Bradley says. “A lifetime of infamy ahead, if we don’t kill him now.”
“Boy,” the officer says, “how old are you?”
The younger he seems, the less likely they are to kill him, Henry supposes. He says in a piping voice, “Why, I’m only but six years of age.”
Everyone laughs.
“For a spy, he’s a poor liar,” the fat one says.
“Lock him in the house,” the officer says.
Bradley sighs.
“But I have to go back,” Henry says. “Mother’s dead.”
The officer, however, is turning to a commotion among the tents—a dog chasing chickens. Two of the redcoats seize Henry by the armpits and haul him toward the house. “No no no!” Henry cries. “Mother! I have to go back!” He kicks left and right, until one of the soldiers grunts with annoyance and slams a fist into the side of Henry’s head, and the world swings like a hawk wheeling.
Henry sits on the floor of a small room, sized for a narrow bed and a chest of drawers, although it holds neither bed nor chest, but only a single small desk with two drawers and a printed portrait of George Washington held to the wall with pins. Light enters by a window built high into the wall, two feet wide but no taller than a pack of cards. Henry cannot possibly fit through.
Henry can hear Mother’s endless mutter so very faintly that he isn’t sure if he is imagining it. He feels terribly alone. He huffs. Tears trickle down to spot the floor.
But presently his misery makes him angry. He hits the door and lifts onto his toes to peer out the window. On the field under dying sunlight the soldiers have settled around their fires with bottles of whiskey, rum, and wine. The black soldiers are a strange sight, firearms and military accoutrements having been kept well away from the slaves in Henry’s experience. He can see about a half-dozen blacks, all imbibing whiskey alongside the white soldiers, except for one who sits quietly, not drinking—Henry realizes he knows him, Radnor, Suthers’s slave who came to Henry in the morning to tell him about Franklin. At that time Radnor had been wearing a linsey-woolsey smock; now he’s in a too-small redcoat over a pair of brown trousers that look like they may have been taken from Suthers’s wardrobe. The sight of Radnor in a redcoat is as strange to Henry as anything that he has seen this day, and he stares for a long time.
Mr. Suthers said there was no reason to hire an overseer to manage only three field slaves, so he had Mrs. Suthers manage them. When she died, the eldest of the daughters took to giving orders. She said she gave Radnor more liberty than she ought, but Radnor wouldn’t run off because he wouldn’t leave behind his mute brother Charles and his blind brother Hollis, and he couldn’t escape for long while dragging those two behind.
Hollis, Charles, and Radnor have been at the farm all of Henry’s life. Father, a Federalist living in the land of Republicans, said that the slaves ought to be free like any other men, for slavery was an immoral institution. Henry figured that he agreed with Father about this, but he stopped repeating it after he had been informed by the second youngest of Suthers’s sneering daughters that that was what a Phipps would say, since the Phippses had been forced to sell their slaves long ago and now lived like vermin. Let all the slaves be freed, why not, when it wouldn’t cost the Phippses a thing? Let everyone live like vermin. Henry said that his grandfather had sold the slaves because he knew that owning a man was immoral (this was a thing that Father had suggested once, although even he offered it without much conviction). The second youngest sister said that that was a lie, but if it were true, look what happened to the Phippses. Why would anyone else do such a thing?
Henry booted her in the shin so that she ran off shrieking, but afterward he did notice that Father never talked about freeing the slaves with anyone who was likely to disagree. And Father, who liked to go and converse with the slaves for a few minutes and afterward proclaim their marvelous intelligence, and Mother, who pursed her lips and said that she pitied them, and even Franklin, who in his slow way endeavored to treat unequivocally with any matter he saw as touching on honor—none of them would have thought for a second of helping a slave to escape, any more than they would have thought of loosing the neighbor’s goats.
But, evidently, the British would. Henry studies Radnor’s dour face, trying to understand. Henry’s first thought was that the redcoats must have purchased Radnor from Suthers, but then he supposes that the redcoats are simply taking Radnor, the same way they are taking the horses, pigs, whiskey, and such. The puzzling question is, what is Radnor now? Is Radnor no longer a slave? Is he British? Henry knows that the British don’t have slaves, so Radnor wouldn’t be a British slave. And where are Hollis and Charles? Is Radnor leaving behind Hollis and Charles? The eldest Suthers daughter said he never would.
He cannot see Hollis and Charles anywhere, but the brothers are said to have Cherokee blood, and Henry knows they can be as silent and invisible as Indians—even Hollis, despite his blindness—with great skill at roaming in the dark. Sometimes all the slaves in Maryland and Virginia seem to be wandering about at night, evading the slave patrols with little trouble. Henry, who also likes to be out in the night, has seen them and sometimes he has heard Hollis playing the Jew’s harp, and Radnor softly singing:
Who stole the pigeon pie
And hid him in the bag o’ rye?
Charles, the mute, had once appeared silently behind Henry in the center of an open field and tapped his shoulder. Henry felt his heart might never start again. It was Charles’s idea of a joke. He bent to grab his knees, convulsing with his weird coughing laugh.
If Radnor is with the redcoats, Henry thinks, then Radnor can explain to the others that Henry is not a spy. He shouts and bangs on the window, but Radnor doesn’t notice, too far away. No one notices. Henry turns to the door and shouts and kicks. He hears soldiers moving around the house, sees a line of lamplight come and go under the door, but no one pays him any heed. Henry shouts and kicks until he is hoarse and both feet hurt. He sits, falls back, lies flat on the floor, panting.
Perhaps he should try to sleep, pass the
night. But he fears that Mother will be angry at being left alone. And a whispery sound catches his ear.
“What?” he says.
He’s sure it’s her. He listens hard, but he can’t quite grasp the words. He knows, however, her tone of complaint. He jumps to his feet. “Mother! Stop, stop, stop!” Now that he hears her, he doesn’t want to hear her, not in that carping voice. “They’ve locked me in!” He rattles the door to show her.
Still he can hear her. In a fury he pulls the desk from the wall, topples it over, yanks out the drawers, throws them down. Something clinks on the floor, and he discovers it is a half-dollar, which had been hidden in one of the drawers. Typically this find would be thrilling, but now it is bitterly useless. Mother’s voice won’t stop. He pockets the half-dollar and stomps around, wondering what else he can find. He feels along the baseboards, then into the gaps between the floorboards. The only light is an egg-shaped moon in the window, and he must seek with his fingertips. There are several pebbles wedged between the boards. One he draws out and examines in the dismal light until he is sure: a worn flint.
He pulls the George Washington off the wall and tears it into thin pieces. He breaks a desk drawer into smaller and smaller pieces, assembles a pile of paper and tinder. Tediously, he works the little flint against one of the steel pins that held the George Washington on the wall. It requires many attempts to throw a spark, and the spark dies before it reaches the paper. He keeps trying. Spark. Spark. Spark.
A spark touches an edge of paper and embers. He puffs the faintest puff of air to give it life. Puff. Puff. Puff. The ember expands over the fragment of paper, bridges to the next.
He adds paper and breath until a yellow fingernail of flame appears. He adds fuel. The flame opens like a tiny fist. Soon it touches the wall. He breaks the legs off the desk, puts them into the flame.
