by Bill Cheng
I pulled you to me, my pea, let you heave and sob against my chest. Your skin against me—it’d been so long. I had forgotten that warmth.
I walked you back into the house where you grabbed at Little Robert, who stared bewildered and afraid as his mama clutched and cried against him.
The boys offered their condolences. They said they knew Billy, that they were friends from Mayersville. One of them was a skinny, asthmatic boy. I’d learn later that he was the one who snuck over after the riders had left and cut the rope from Billy’s sweet neck. Even the driver, who looked uncertain of himself around us, climbed down from his bench and offered up his hand to me before he took off down the road.
I invited Billy’s friends to stay the night and they obliged me. You had fled to the other room and would not come out so I put the dinner together, the first I’d ever cooked—burnt rice and tasteless boiled greens. They waited, their faces bent over their steaming plates. I heard you in the other room, your painful sobbing. No one spoke. No one looked at each other.
In the hours before dawn, we worked fast to put the body under the ground. I suppose some part of me thought that if I could get him under, if I could hide him away, it would soften our grief somehow. We took him out to the edge of the back tract behind the house, where you and Robert couldn’t see. We dug by lantern, and by first light we laid him under without coffin or blessing, in a dirt mound. When we had finished, we walked back to the house with our shovels, arms weary, backs spiked with pain. My head buzzed from want of sleep. I offered to let the boys stay another day but they refused.
I went inside and you were asleep. I lay down, my thoughts empty and useless, and found my way into sleep. When I woke up, Little Robert was looking down at me. He looked startled when he saw me. He jumped away and stopped himself in the doorway.
I sat up and looked at him burning with shame. Robert, I said. Then suddenly he took a step forward and I put my arms around him. I cupped his small head in my big hands and held him close, smelling of earth.
We each of us were rough and awkward in our grief. Little Robert I worried over the most. Outwardly he wasn’t much changed, but inside, I saw storms. He didn’t cry, but to everyone and everything, he cast a dark eye. To me, his solitude became frightening. When he scraped his knee or was startled by lightning, he no longer came to us for comfort and protection. I suppose he had figured that we were not much good for it.
In those early weeks, you would not let him from your sight. You held on to him, would sleep with him tucked hard against your chest. It seemed to soothe you some, but the smallest reminder of his brother would send you into violent spasms of grief and bring a black cloud over all of us.
You cried every day—cursing God and me and your damned life. You tore your hair and beat the walls with your fists. Your rage was something larger than you could handle. It wore you out—leached the black from your hair, pressed hard cruel lines about your eyes and cheeks.
Then one day, it was over. You stopped crying. Stopped talking. Stopped doing much of anything. We were just shades.
Wasn’t long after that the Great Flood came. And though you saw those waters as judgment from on high, I could not find the same solace. Our family was broken, and I knew my part in its breaking.
SOMEHOW, WE SURVIVED, THE HIGH water and that bastard and his boat. On dry land they picked us up and trucked us from the flood ledge a half hour to Camp Mercy in Hollandale. Out the window were the stone-wracked road, the chain-linked gate, three and one-half acres of parkland, rowed with pup tents. The sky was a gray slate and the pines shimmered with wet. There were a dozen of us crowded together in the back of the truck, too spent to move. The rain was coming through the torn canvas, and we sat inch-deep in the water.
The truck took us to a brick house, where a line of refugees stretched out through the door. One by one, we climbed out and were given oilskin ponchos and made to get in line. You wouldn’t let me near you with the slicker. You turned away, protesting. In the end, I draped it around you as best I could, like a cape, and me, you, and Robert stood there in the rain.
When it came our turn, we put our names to a long list, and men came to separate us out. The boy was put with me, while two attendants tried to guide you into another room. They only wanted to help, Etta. But you saw they were coming and you seized up, let out a wail, and grabbed at our child. They tried to force down your arms but you wouldn’t let go, clutching at him for dear life.
Finally the man in charge waved the attendants away and let Robert stay with you. I went into a separate room, where a man went through my hair with a comb and tweezers. They read my pulse and had me swallow a vitamin pill. I was led down into a basement, where I could change into a gusset shirt and pants. You and the boy came down soon after. We were given a ration card and a box of supplies and were shown on a map where to find our tent.
We hiked through the drizzle, across the parkland, going up and down the rows. The other survivors watched us from within their pup tents, their faces tense and silent. We found our shelter, at the edge of the camp, where the stink of the latrines was made worse from the rains. When we arrived, there was a man inside, asleep on the canvas flooring. His clothes were full of patches, and the tops of his shoes had been torn off.
The man startled when he heard us.
Sorry, he said. He stood up, excused himself, and walked out into the rain.
I unpacked the box: a change of clothes, three pairs of trousers and two shirts, not a one of them sized right. Underneath the clothes were two sleeping bags, a comb, two toothbrushes, and a pack of cigarettes.
We slept huddled, the rain pattering the canvas around us, the dead weight of our bodies on top of each other. I woke several times through the night, too empty to move, and I saw the raw morning spill through a tear in the canvas, the sky mud yellow, clanking with rain, like the first dawn on the ancient Earth. We woke rested but hungry, and when the ration truck came down our row, I fought my way through the mob for a parcel of powdered milk, rock hominy, two pounds of hash, and a bar of soap.
The days turned to weeks, and those ragged half-drowned souls would pour into Mercy stinking of mold and rot and dysentery, their bodies rain-beat and shiftless. Mosquitoes ranged the camp, hunting blood as we fought and clamored for the short supply of netting. At all hours, men who could no longer stand were carted in wagons to the medical tents. They were pale and feverous, their skin spotted with carbuncles.
Rumors spread that the deathly sick were doped with morphine, then trucked out to the river and thrown in. And still every day more refugees were trucked in, each more desperate than the last. When they ran out of housing, the refugees were placed in cots inside offices. Soon they cut our rations to a parcel every two weeks and men were driven to thieving. At night I slept with an iron spike under my shirt.
It didn’t take long for the troubles in Mercy to call down the greedy and opportunistic. Pimps, pitchmen, and Bible-thumpers beset Mercy’s borders. At dusk you could see the painted women slip into the pup tents, and at dawn the snake-oil men would square their territories on the avenues and yodel into the crowds. They were a circus for the sick and desperate, filching what little we had managed to salvage of our former lives.
Because I was among the able-bodied, I joined one of the labor crews.
The work took me away from the camp, away from you and Robert, but it earned us an extra parcel come delivery day. Five days a week, I’d take the work truck out of Mercy through Hollandale to the flood shelf. There, with a few dozen men, I’d sift through the wrecked towns. Homes that hadn’t been destroyed in the flood had been gutted and looted. In the streets, the smell was unbearable. Waterlogged bodies floated in the knee-deep water, the flesh coming apart like rotten fruit. We worked for hours with no protection from the biting flies that trailed the corpses.
It was a hell but still I went. I told myself we needed food. Sup
plies. My travel pass let me come and go out of Camp Mercy, into Hollandale, where I could try to barter for better food, blankets, medicine. But truth was—forgive me—a part of me was glad to get out every morning, away from you. You got worse as the days went on, and I would not let on how bad it got. You muttered to yourself and barked like a dog. Didn’t dress nor bathe no more, and there were times I felt so frail that I could not carry another burden.
It fell to Robert to tend to his mama, and he did so without complaint. He bathed you, changed and washed your clothes. Little Robert helped in a way no child should ever have to.
Then one day, when I had come home early, and I found you inside the tent, my Etta, a strange look across your face. I came closer and the smell overtook me. You were not embarrassed or angry or sad. Just frowned a little. Robert wasted no time. He held your arms straight up. Before I understood what was happening, he’d lifted the dress over his mama’s head. A hard sour grief overtook me. I saw my Etta, my sweet Etta—body, mind, and soul lay in ruins. A woman older than her years. Her body covered in sores, folds of skin hanging from her belly from where she’d wasted. Little Robert kept his eyes to the floor, tried not to look at his mama, her large sagging breasts. I could tell he had done this many times before. He fetched a wet rag and wiped you clean. Then he rubbed salve on the insect bites that covered your thighs.
God forgive me.
In the next three days, I managed to scrounge up fifty dollars. I made arrangements with a woman named Lucinda Quinn, the owner of a cathouse who had been scouting for promising girls out of Mercy and into her employ. She looked at me queer when I offered our boy up for an apprenticeship. He was well behaved, I told her, and good at house duties. He cleaned and swept and did the wash in the camp and did not eat much. She had no call for boys in her trade, she told me, but after she’d seen the sorry state of the boy’s parents, she relented and took my money. I woke Little Robert at midnight, prying him from your sleeping hold. I dressed him quick and took him out across the camp where the wagon would be waiting. He was still groggy, eyes half shut, moaning.
That night I worried over what I would tell him. What words were there to see him through the coming years without his mother or his father? When we got to the wagons, there weren’t none I could muster. I prayed that when he was older, he would understand and that if my one blood child left would hate me, let him hate me for my weakness and not for my love.
Our boy looked at the horses, bewildered. Their breaths were steaming. I spun him ’round to face me, too hard, that there was a look of shock on his face.
I opened my mouth, but there wasn’t nothing coming out.
I stood up quick, shame and tears galling my throat. I sought out Lucinda Quinn, caught her look so that she understood that the boy was here, and then very quickly I turned away and left our one living son in a cold dark field.
THERE IS ONE MAN, A preacher, that sniffs around these parts, skimming up the poor souls. After days of trying, he’d managed to hunt me down. He come to me with his little black book and said that I was aggrieved, with my son lost and my wife ill, that if any soul needed comfort, it would be mine. Said the Lord was here to lighten my load if I was willing to let him. Then he opened up that little book, read some of I don’t know what, then he said that God made man for living and dying both, that all that happens is part of the Lord’s plan for me, and that we may all be rejoined in the kingdom of heaven, and on and on and on.
I told him that I surely wished that were true. But I am not a man for tall tales. My life is over. It begins and ends in the same place, where the past will keep happening.
And now it’s you and me again, Etta. And there are days when I am here beside you, holding your hand, that a great lonesomeness falls upon me. But then there are those brief, stolen moments where you look on me with such kindness. Not love, but kindness. And in my mind’s eye I can still see that cotton field, our bodies across each other, the scent of sweet clover in our lungs. And the grief becomes too much.
I look on you and I’m the one who has been left behind. Sometimes I can glimpse the world in which you live. It’s a place better than this one—where our sons still live, and we are young, and your husband is a better man, strong, assured of himself, and not this damned fool beside you, holding out his nigger heart.
PART SIX
HOME
(1941)
Robert fled through bristlegrass and acacia, along the hogback into a deep blue strath below the dell. There was no moon, only thatches of starlight through the cloudbreak. That morning he’d cut his beard with his knife, clearing the lice from his face and blooding the air. For days the Dog ignored the traps he’d laid—snuffling at the poisoned meat then loping into the bushes. No matter where he went, it was always ahead of him. He’d double back, change directions, but at every turn, he’d find evidence of its passing. A broken trail, paw prints in the soft black earth.
He had seen it only once. The third day out it rained, and the gulch he’d fled across had engorged. He pulled himself up to a weeded ridge—the powder of his rifle wet and clotted. He began to strip away his clothes, and as his shirt passed over his head, he saw two yellow eyes sheltered under the lantana. He did not move. They watched each other, the rain passing between them. His knife was on his belt, new and strange. He did not move.
The Dog yawned and flicked its tongue. After a while, it drew away. Robert drank his canteen empty then refilled it in the stream. Then he drank again, hungrily, his throat throbbing. When the rain stopped hours later, he continued, trying to avoid the fresh tracks in the mud.
Now the wind heeled through the grasses, his hair, his clothes. He shivered and his eyes began to water. The clouds broke and a lobe of moon cast down across a meadow. A hundred yards away, the forest began again, and he strained his eyes toward the darkness. Somewhere the Dog howled. It was ahead of him, how far he did not know. It howled again, lonesome and cold, sliding up through the gusts. The wind changed. It was on his back now and at once, the howling stopped.
He wiped the wet from his eyes and got to his feet. There, in the dark, he saw a shape. They regarded each other. He brought his rifle up slowly and leaned into the sight. It stepped toward him, then circled. His fingers were stiff in the cold and when the shot discharged, the barrel swung into the wind. He recharged the rifle, but the shape was gone.
There was a low whistle. He turned. Across the dell, a train ran along the blue hills—two lights racing behind skirts of dogwood and mayhaw. It threw up a steam plume above the forest, then disappeared around the bend.
He headed back into the forest and built a bivvy and a fire beside a fallen tree. He let himself sleep into the late morning before picking up the trail again. He headed north, northeast, toward the hills where the train came through. The Dog kept a pace ahead of him, a few miles at a time, resting in places, before continuing on again. It was mocking him. Soon the forest fell away, leading out to a grass valley and a dirt road along the train tracks. At the crossing, he found a mound of scat, jeweled with horseflies. It’d been left in the square of rails like an offering. A car came down the road and Robert stepped to the side. He waved it down.
It must’ve been a Sunday. Inside the car, a white family was in their church clothes. The woman was holding down her straw hat. The man had his blond hair standing on end from the wind blowing through it. There were two boys in the back, all stockinged and blue-eyed. They looked at Robert, disgusted.
You know where this road goes past these hills?
Town of Anguilla, the man said. He looked Robert up and down. It’s got an ordinance.
Then the car sped off again.
Robert started walking.
Up the hill there was an old grain silo that hadn’t seen use in some time. He pried his way in with a metal pipe and had a look around. The grain stores were eaten through and rotten with rats. The roof was falling apart so the
ceiling was freckled with sky. He found a lamp with a little oil in it, and he broke it down to make a tiny fire pit there in the dirt. Then he slept with his back against a wall, the fire burning to keep the rats away. His sleep was dreamless and when he woke, it was already dusk. His throat was sandpaper, and coils of heat were searing his lungs. He stood himself up. His body felt like concrete. He picked up his gun, his pack—the whole weight of the world on a strap against his shoulder. He trudged on.
Three miles out, he could see where the town began—a cluster of clapboard buildings, run-down and slaughtered by the weather. There was music coming from one of the houses, something bright and full of longing. He followed it down the road and came to a juke house off the main road. Buckets of ice sat on the porch. Inside a Negro minstrel was sitting on a stool, working a cigar box in his lap. The front of it had been hollowed out and three steel cables stretched down from the top of a broom handle. The minstrel slid the back of a knife along the cables, making them sound. There were chairs arranged around him, a drunk splayed out on one of them, and on the side wall, the barman was chipping a block of ice into a tub. His shirtsleeves were rolled, and he looked up at Robert, wiped his mouth, and went back to his business.
Robert sat down at the counter and listened to the minstrel play. The man fretted the knife against the strings, rang the cables low and rusty, then glided into a high hum. Robert felt his soul rising out of him, leaving him empty.
