Constellations

by Tim Bryant

  Art:

  This little light of mine

  I'm gonna let it shine

  This little light of mine

  I'm gonna let it shine

  This little light of mine

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  When I take my boat down river

  I'm gonna let it shine

  When I take my boat down river

  I'm gonna let it shine

  When I take my boat down river

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  Aunt You:

  Jesus gave this light to me

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Jesus gave this light to me

  I'm gonna let it shine

  I once was blind, now I can see

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  Aunt You:

  Don't let Satan blow it out

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Don't let Satan blow it out

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Don't let Satan blow it out

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  Art:

  All the way to Africa

  I'm gonna let it shine

  All the way to Africa

  I'm gonna let it shine

  All the way to South America

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  Art and Aunt You:

  Hide it under a bushel, no

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Ain't gonna let 'em hide it, no

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Hide it under a bushel, no

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  Aunt You:

  On my way to Canaan land

  I'm gonna let it shine

  On my way to Canaan land

  I'm gonna let it shine

  I'm on my way to Canaan, Lord

  I'm gonna let it shine

  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, shine, shine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  Art:

  Hello Central

  Please give me 209

  Hello Central

  Please give me 209

  Hello Central

  Please give me 209

  Keep your hands off of it,

  'cause it's mine, mine, mine

  Let it shine, let it shine shine shine

  I used to be of the opinion that time was a constant, maybe the only constant. I no longer hold that belief. I've had weeks flash by without seeming to notice, and I've seen a day or two stretch out so long in front of me, I never thought they would end.

  The next couple of days were like that.

  Art had said more than once that he had been transfigurated, and I decided to find out everything I could about the word. The concept. What Art meant when he said it. The little library in downtown Nacogdoches wasn't welcoming to the colored residents, but I knew two or three different people in our community who had personal libraries that were just as useful. One was the superintendent of the colored school. One was a deacon in the Methodist Church.

  Thinking that being transfigurated seemed like some kind of religious thing, I went to Deacon Dupre first. Deacon Dupre said he thought it was a Catholic thing, but I was welcome to borrow his Encyclopedia on Major World Religions if I thought it might be of some help. Dr. Elias Hines from the high school said he was almost positive that Jesus himself had been transfigurated, but he wasn't sure when or exactly how.

  I was getting nowhere, both figuratively and literally, so I took a ride. It had been my habit for some time to take the family car out for a drive when I needed to get away and clear my head. Normally, I would stay within certain parameters, all on the south and east side of town. Lately, I had taken to driving south. Press Road or the one toward Woden. Watching people on the roadside.

  Who was this man who called himself Artillery Conray Patton? The question had been on my mind since the night at The Pepper Pot. I had written page after page trying to work myself toward an answer. Some glimpse of truth. I dreamed about it at night. And then, after the Sunday morning radio broadcast, the question had shifted. It had become more unsettling. Instead of dreaming about it at night, I laid awake, going over and over it.

  If I were to believe the story, Art Patton didn't know who Art Patton was. If that were the case, my story became more than a story. It was no longer a chance to tell readers something that would enrich their lives. It became an opportunity to tell Art something that would define his.

  "Like Isaac digging the old wells of Abraham," Ephriam said.

  I didn't have any idea what he was talking about, but I agreed anyway.

  "If Abraham dug up the ghost of a dead baby," I said.

  We were back on what was left of the Conray plantation. I had found the old slave quarters easy enough, taking time to paint some kind of picture of how they had looked originally. Where there were now two, there had once been eight or ten, all pointing back in the direction of Billy Conray's place, which appeared to be empty. I showed Ephriam the area that I believed to have once been the pond, and then pointed out the general direction of the Big House.

  Once he got a lay of the land, we grabbed shovels and set out to find some evidence of the wells. The old wells of Conray. The undergrowth made it hard to see the forest floor in most places, and I told him there was likely to be very little except maybe the foundation left from the house, and maybe even less of the wells.

  As Ephriam swept across the area in front of him, already getting dark under the cover of pines, he called out to me.

  "So old Blue Dick is buried somewhere right out in here."

  I said yes, if the story was true. I went to work, pushing layer upon layer of brush away to reveal the damp earth below. The smell was strong. Life and death and rebirth all set free from their places in the cycle.

  "You know the very first song you ever heard Art Patton sing?"

  I thought for a minute but was surprised to find I couldn't name it.

  "Probably a Lightnin' Hopkins," I said.

  I could almost hear Ephriam grin. He was swinging his flat shovel, not so far off to the right of me that I couldn't hear it sweep and swipe against the ground. Suddenly, he started to singing in time.

  You can't read, you can't write

  You can't get no supper tonight

  You can't read, you can't write

  You can't get no supper tonight

  Had any young couple pulled up on the road at that moment, they would have thought they were hearing a ghost from a different time for sure. The hair stood up on my arm. It seemed to me that everything had been turned around. We were the ghosts, come back to a distant past to scare up our own ancestors. I was losing myself in just such a convoluted thought when Ephriam gave out a shout. Not a frightened shout necessarily, but an excited one. The song, as good as it was, was cut short.

  "Found something," he said.

  His shovel was sticking out a pile of red dirt about half a foot below the forest floor. Around the base of it, you could see the remnants of a stone foundation.

  "Looks like someone's been digging here before," Ephriam said.

  I stuck my shovel into it. It was sticky and clay-like and wouldn't shake off.

  "I don't think so," I said, picking through the surrounding foliage like I was picking through bad food with a fork. "More likely
it's just settled over time Might still be a natural spring underneath it."

  I tossed a shovel full of hard dirt to one side, leaving everything in its path stained a blood red.

  "Could be it's the wrong well," Ephriam said.

  We both knew the story. How an older, smaller well had been abandoned and a bigger one built some distance away. Of course, there would be no way to tell which was which until we found both, and even then it might prove difficult. We decided that I should continue to look for signs of another one, while Ephriam dug around a little at this one. I grabbed my shovel and took off in what I believed to be the direction of the Big House. Stood to reason if they dug a new one, somebody would suggest that they do it closer to the house. The moon was just rising up out of that same direction, which would help me keep my bearings.

  "So tell me something. It ever strike you that maybe this guy is Harmon Littlejohn," I said. "I mean, has he ever come out and said what happened to that guy?"

  I had sat down more than once, adding up the numbers, adding up the words. It was something that had been moved from the back of my mind to the tip of my tongue, and I finally found someone to say it to.

  "Harmon Littlejohn?"

  I don't know if it was because we were so close to the river or what, but the dirt seemed to be getting looser as Ephriam went. Talking didn't even slow him down.

  "Art pretty much admits that he was going down river to sell off all that stuff, right" said Paul. "From what I understand, he was going to give the money to Harmon. Did he ever say whether he did that?"

  I wanted to defend Art's story, but it wasn't easy. I wanted to believe without having to actually reason any of it out. Kind of the way Aunt You did with the Lord.

  "He told me the whole story one day while we were playing music on the back porch," Ephriam said.

  If I'm being honest, I have to admit the thought made me a little jealous. Not so jealous that I didn't want to hear it, mind you. Maybe envious is a better word.

  "See, that don't add up either," I said. "I thought Little John was the musician. Did he teach Art how to play or what?"

  I could keep looking for a second well or I could join Ephriam and pick up speed. The hole he was in looked to be about six, maybe seven feet wide. Pretty big for a well. Big enough for both of us to stand at the bottom and sling a little dirt.

  "Art learned how to play over in Africa, after Harmon Littlejohn was already dead and gone."

  I jumped in with both feet.

  "We went down to Sabine Pass. Back then, I thought Sabine Pass was the end of the world. I didn't know there was anything else. We got down there okay. We made a stop in Lufkin, but two colored people on a riverboat by their selves was just too much for people to process. Everybody wanted to have a look. The boat wasn't enough. They wanted to take a good look at me and Harmon too. I don't know where they thought we'd sailed from, but I don't think it was Pattonia.

  "We got to Jasper, and one old boy brought some beef jelly sandwiches, soda crackers and sorghum candy. He said we weren't far from Sabine Pass, and he was right. We made it there directly and pulled the Lady Camargo into port and tied up. It took us three or four days there in Sabine pass. I can't remember for sure. We took our first load in to sell. I left Harmon there guarding the ship, you know, and paid a boy that wasn't too much smaller than him to help me tote everything into town.

  "I was aiming to sell at this first place I come to, and there was a long line of people waiting to sell their own wares or maybe buy somebody else's. I wasn't standing there more than an hour when this man comes out and looks at me. I look back, trying to make out whether he thought he knew me from somewhere. Or maybe he did, but I didn't recognize him.

  "He took a long look at my merchandise— just a sample of everything we had stored up on that boat— and said, Mister, you ought to take what you got and go on down to this other place. He give me the number and name of the street. He said, my name is Angel. My uncle works there. Ask for him. I guarantee he'll give you a better price.

  "I never did find out what that first place would have give, so I don't know if he was telling it straight or not, but we took what we had on down the road and found that other place. There wasn't no line, so we did our business pretty fast. I was real satisfied with what we got. It was more money that I had ever seen in my life, and that man's uncle told me to bring as much as I could stand to bring, and he'd pay me the same rate for every bit of it.

  "I took three more loads. Clothes, furniture, silverware, glasses, even paintings right off the wall. One of those paintings went for some big money. I don't know who was the painter. Might have been Michelangelo, I don't know. By the time we unloaded everything we didn't mean to keep, I had a big roll of bills in my pocket. I was a high roller.

  "We took a little piece of it and went to gambling. Cards. Me playing stud poker, Harmon playing keno and bunco. I'd never heard of bunco in my life. I don't think he had either. I would lose a little at the poker table, Harmon would win a little back. Then we'd switch off a while. I thought we was coming out just about even, then Harmon put everything he had on one game and made out like gangbusters. We left Sabine Pass with enough money to burn a wet mule. As they say.

  We saw Angel again before we left, and he asked had we been taken care of. We said we were very satisfied.

  He said, which way y’all going, upriver or down?

  I said, I wanted to see the ocean. I had lived all my life and never seen no ocean. I aimed to get a good look at it before I went anywhere.

  Angel said, what you two fellas need to do is go down and see the ocean and just keep going. You go down to South America. Trinidad. That's where you need to go. Two men like yourselves can live a good life in Trinidad.

  Well, that's what we did, pretty much. When I saw that ocean, something inside me said, Art Patton, there ain't no going back. Ain't no going back now."

  "That Lady Camargo took to the seas like a hog to husks. We pointed ourselves southeast and watched as the land behind us was swallowed up by water and more water. By the time the sun fell and the stars came out, it seemed like we were floating through space, like the stars had come right down to where we could almost touch them.

  "It reminded me that old man in the sky I'd seen on the Conray plantation all those years ago. The old brown memory. Sitting out there on the bow of the boat, pushing our way through the rippling starlight before us, I think I realized who that old man was. Now, I've heard tell that when you look into the sky, you're looking into the past. I don't rightly remember where I heard that, but I wonder if whoever said such a thing had ever been out on a boat in the middle of the ocean. I'm telling you, out there, it seemed like that was all backward. Like maybe a whole bunch of things I'd spent my life thinking were all backward. Seemed more likely to me that you were gazing into the future. Where we haven't yet been. You hear me?

  "If that were the case, it seemed to me that just maybe, I— way back when I was just plain Art, named like a dog and kept like one too— had been given some sort of gift. A short glimpse into my own destiny. Just a glimpse.

  "Right there in that very moment, out there in that great big lake between the lights of home and the lights of Havana, under a whole mess of other lights that connected us all up, I looked back at myself, saw the truth and turned away. Away from myself, the Conray farm, Pattonia, and everything I had learned to think I knew.

  "I told Harmon about it the next day, but it didn't seem as clear then. Like the starlight, it was still there, but it seemed farther away. We steamed on into the southeast, the wind picking up and pushing us right along. Sometimes a little rougher than we wanted it to, but, time to time we'd cut the engines and just let it ride. There were no hatchways to batten down, but, when it was necessary, we would board up the doorway to keep water from collecting.

  "Soon enough, we could see the lights of Havana twinkling at us on the skyline.

  "Those aren't stars, Harmon said.

  "We cruise
d into port and tied up, spent the first night drinking rum and smoking cigars in a bar right on the beach. Liked that night so damn much, we spent the next fifty or sixty recreating it. The people were warm and the sun was friendly. In the afternoons, Harmon would pull out his guitar, and I would plunk around on the music stick, and, before we knew it, we had an audience. I could have stayed there the rest of my life real happy.

  "It wasn't Angel's voice that made me pick up and move again. It was the Lady Camargo's. After all those years out of service, she wasn't ready to be moored so soon. Hell, maybe it was me who wasn't ready. I had spent my whole goddamn life within a ten mile radius. Could I help it if I wanted something different this time around?"

  We could hear a distant chorus of coyotes chasing down a deer or something, and every now and then a possum or rabbit would scurry through the brush, but, other than that, it was the two of us and a big hole in the ground. We had a pretty good system going. Whenever one of us would hit a root that was too big to chop through with a shovel, the other one would grab the hand saw and start cutting. We might have been making fairly good time. I don't know. Truth is, we lost all track of time and could've been working through the night and right into the next day. Down at the bottom of that pit, it was hard to tell anything for sure.

  I was working on a big pine root that cut right through our path, and Ephriam stopped for a minute to rest his arms.

  "Reckon this is what they mean when they talk about root hogging?" he said.

  He went back to work. If you stopped for too long, your muscles would tighten up on you and you were screwed up for sure.

  "Root hogging our way back to Mother Earth," I said.

  I told him about my run-in with Billy Lee Conray the Third, and he said I was lucky I hadn't been killed and thrown in the well already. Ephriam had known the cousin of one of the boys Conray had shot in Nacalina. The colored one. I had assumed all three of them had been colored, but turned out that only one had.