Ella, Walker, and Senior stare.
“Pull yourself together,” Walker demands. “Go down to the old woman see if she ain’t got something to keep it from falling off.”
“That’s a damn shame,” Senior says. “Thought for sure if there was a curse, and I ain’t saying there is, but if it was, wouldn’t expect this gal would already be touched.”
“She was probably worn down when I got her. Damn Thompson sold me a rotten one.”
It’s nearly light when Walker returns. Ella whimpers. “Don’t you worry none,” he says. “You still good for something.” He unlocks the chains letting them clang to the floor around her feet. Before she can run he forces his fingers inside her—slaps her for being “dumb enough to let a buck take her and for not having the decent morals of the lowest farm animal”—pulls her to her knees, yanks the rag from her mouth, and forces his man part between her teeth. Words flash behind her closed eyes. Slave. Breeding. Papa. God. Home. She bites down.
There isn’t nothing else to do but hold on. Junior howls and bucks. His fists crash into Ella’s head. Even as she lets go, the sides of her head, her mouth, her eyes, her chest, her belly, her legs, her special places crumple beneath the blows. Barefoot, he gives a final kick to her mouth. Teeth give way. She swallows them—eight teeth gulped like dreams.
Walker grabs her feet, drags her across the barn, across planks, nails, manure. He lifts her up high and tosses her into a mushy pile. If she hadn’t rolled off she would have died there, buried in a pile of dung. Darkness fills her head. Pain swirls into a melody. Tiny sharp rocks bite into her back, her arms, her legs. They dig into her cheeks. Moving hurts. Not moving hurts. She measures short breaths: in, out, in, out, with long pauses in between. The motion makes her sides hurt so she stops. Something inside is broken. Her eyes are puffy and sore, her jaw aches, her head rings like a church bell. She flicks her tongue along the oozing holes in her mouth. Gone. Her mouth is heavy with dirt and rocks, her tongue slippery with seed she will not swallow that thickens and mixes with spit and tears. Her flat palms press the cool earth. Her dull nails filled with dried slivers of skin and flecks of blood dig into the ground. Ella’s lips are raw, swollen, and blistered, gummed shut. She moans in a rich baritone that would have been the envy of all the girls in the choir.
A deeper voice joins in. A girl with hair thick and matted, clothes thin and worn; a voice sweet like love, forgiveness, peace, joy, and anything at all worth having hums Ella’s song.
Mama?
Ella lays naked, surrounded by trash, leavings, and dirt at the bottom of a hill. Her arms and legs twisted, her body bruised, sore, broken; her soul stolen. Through squinting eyes, the girl’s smile is the last thing Ella sees. The darkness takes over. Ella Mae Clarke is going home.
Chapter 7
Ella wakes to warm hands and cool water dripping over her body. She’s still alive. Damn. The touch is gentle, loving. The hands move in circles, kneading and cleansing. Ella’s skin is raw. It flits and jumps.
“Way you was carrying on, thought you’d be all busted up,” a girl’s voice says. Smelling of sweat and lilac, she’s kneeling just beside her. Too close.
Ella tries to open her mouth.
“Don’t try to talk. I haven’t tended your mouth. Probably a good thing too. Youse a screamer. I’m Agnes,” she says as if she isn’t wiping blood and seed from between Ella’s thighs. “And don’t you even think about running. You hear?” Agnes lays down her cloth and scoops up a rusted rifle. She points it at Ella’s head. “Massa say you even look like you thinking about running, I shoot.”
Ella flinches. Shoot me then.
“I’m hoping I don’t have to shoot you none. Who you think gotta clean all that up?” Agnes laughs, settles the rifle beside her.
It takes three trips to get enough fresh water from the river to clean Ella’s body to Agnes’s satisfaction. Agnes’s job is to tend the sick until Mama Skins gets around to them. She just moves the aches around to different places, but Mama Skins is a healer.
When the sun goes down, Agnes pushes and pulls Ella across the pasture. How can it take so long to drag one little dainty gal home, Agnes thinks. Not like she’s helping neither. They’ve been moving forever and they aren’t even to the halfway post let alone to the gate. She’ll be late. If she doesn’t get back in time to feed the animals, Mama will kill her dead. And it will be her own fault too. If she dies tonight Mama will have no one to blame but her old fool self. Agnes, boil the meat. Agnes, keep the gophers out of Master’s garden. Agnes, keep the chickens out of Missus’s drawers. Agnes, bring me that colored gal. Like all she needed was one more thing to do. She props Ella up to see if she can stand. She slumps over and slides to the ground. Her head thuds softly on a bed of grass.
“You’d think you’d have sense enough not to fall down,” Agnes says, staring down at her. She’s already had to leave her good bucket and cloths behind the barn, now she’ll have to leave Papa’s busted-up rifle too. This gal sure is a lot of trouble. “I’m gonna leave this right here. So’s you know, I can run faster than a cow at a barbecue. You start to look like you running away and I’ll come right back and blow your head off. Clear off.” In case she doesn’t understand, Agnes waves her hand in her best “your head rolling away” motion. She puts the rifle down. With her hands beneath Ella’s armpits, she hoists her up again. She lets Ella lean against her. Agnes studies the small frame. Ella’s hair is thick and matted, her arms and legs are bruised, and her lips are busted up. She looks like a hen that got caught out in a real bad storm. “What if I just pick you up?”
Ella moans.
“I’ll be careful.”
Ella moans louder.
“Suit yourself.” Agnes pushes her through the high grass of the far field. The grass stings her legs. If she’d only move those big feet. “If you’d walk, we’d get there faster,” Agnes says.
Ella shakes her head hard. Agnes waits to see if it will pop off. If it does, Mama Skins will just put it back on.
“Mama Skins is going to make the hurt stop. You’ll see. It won’t be so bad round here after that.”
Ella keeps shaking her head.
“She gonna look after you.”
More head shaking.
“You ain’t gotta like it. This is home now.”
The head shaking is joined by Ella rolling her eyes.
“See that fence there. We make it to there, we can rest a spell.”
Ella digs her feet into the soil.
Still pulling her, Agnes plods ahead, ignoring the tufts of dirt and grass she’ll have to replant. “Look, past that fence, we going through those woods, by the river, and when we get to Mama Skins you can moan and twitch all you like, hear?”
Ella goes stiff. She even stops that annoying sliding motion she’d been getting away with.
Agnes has a good mind to slap her across the face. She stops pushing, twirls her around, puts her face close enough to Ella to breathe the same breath. Hand raised, she looks deep in Ella’s eyes for a long time. They are brown and wide, filled with fear, anger, hope, and staring back at Agnes. Agnes turns away first. She lowers her hand, unwraps her shawl—old even before it was handed down from the Missus—and loosely hangs it on Ella’s thin shoulders. “We rest when we get to the woods. Then we head home.”
Just beyond the fence, Agnes lays Ella down in her favorite spot under the copse of willow trees. Above them, thin branches interlock and embrace, sway and create a gentle breeze. The drooping leaves weave a canopy. Agnes wants to tell her that nothing bad happens here. Knees on the hard ground, she stretches her arms wide. “All this,” she says instead, “is Walker land.”
“Hmmphh.”
“It is. Them fields, that barn, those pastures—morning and evening one—these woods, that river stretch from one end of Walker land clear to another and farther too. And you know what?”
“Hmmphh.”
“It’s cursed.”
Ella tenses.
“Got our own haints right here. I ain’t never seen nor heard ’em but everybody know it. ’Cept you. Course you wouldn’t knowed it. But you should have felt it. First time they step foot on Walker land most folk say they feel something pushing them right back off. And you know what again? They don’t allow nothing to grow here that they don’t want to. Them haints is stingy. Onliest thing that grow here is blueberries and carrots. That’s it. Plant lettuce, know what spring up? Blueberries. Plant good ol’ mustard greens. Know what spring up? Blueberries. Mantha and Meredith—them’s the cooks up at the house—got so good at making blueberry cakes, blueberry pie, blueberry tea, blueberry stew. They got everybody fooled into thinking they like blueberry. And if you don’t, there’s carrot cake, carrot pie, carrot tea, carrot stew. Like you some meat? A good ol’ hog bone or calf foot? Don’t even look at them cows out the pasture. Each and every cow on this place got a number and if one missing, there’s hell to pay. Ain’t no baby cows here, count of the curse. No baby nothing. No baby chicks, no baby pigs, no baby slaves. Only thing allowed to grow up on Walker is me. Know why?” She lies down next to Ella, buries her fingers into the dirt, breathes slowly as if she’s fallen asleep. “It’s cuz they choose me. The haints do. Couldn’t be no babies born on this place before or after me. All of them born dead. Mantha and Meredith babies died fore they was born. And after that, Missus’s baby. And after that no more baby cows. And after that no more baby nothing. The haints sent Walker to find me. Told him exactly where to go to find my other mama dying in the woods, running off, I suspect. Walker saved me. Brought me back to Mama Skins. I wasn’t the first. He brought other ones home and you know what they did? Died.” She snaps her fingers, grins as Ella jumps. “Wasn’t nothing wrong with them till they got here. Haints ain’t want ’em. Tried a few more after me. They died too. I’m the onliest one growed up here. I sure hope you don’t die.” She jumps up and brushes her scratchy gingham dress off before nudging Ella with her bare foot. “Think you can get up?”
Still on the ground, Ella folds her short body into a ball. Her bony knees bend into her little chest. Her thin arms wrap around her long legs. Her feet tucked beneath her, she cries. For a while Agnes watches her back shake. “You want to die here, fine.” She walks slow enough to give Ella time to change her mind, pull her body up, drag her feet in that slow walk she has and catch up. She counts the trees: beech, beech, oak, oak, pine, pine, pine. What’s taking her so long? She probably got lost. Even though the path is clear as day and Agnes hasn’t even gone that far, the poor little dumb thing is probably all turned around and scared she won’t find her. Fine, she’ll save the gal. Just one more thing to do.
She turns slowly, half expecting to find Ella right behind her. She searches through the wood to the left of the path. Then to the right. Mama Skins will kill her if she’s let the girl get lost. What if something has gobbled her up? Agnes hopes it will try to eat her too. Not a hungry bite but a little taste; maybe a nibble of foot. Mama Skins can’t be mad if the thing takes a bite of her too. Just in case, she tiptoes back to where she left her. Ella lies there with her legs crossed ankle to ankle and her arms laced across her chest.
“Hey there,” Agnes whispers, “you dead?” She lightfoots close enough to see Ella’s chest moving. “No? Well, I can’t let you die in the woods, Mama Skins will kill me.” She stoops down close, whispers: “If you dead when your papa come, what you want me to tell him?”
Ella twists her lips but holds her arms out.
“I heard you carrying on about your papa coming to rescue you. I expect they heard you clear up to the house and back down to the fields. I don’t mind telling you, all that screaming set my spine to shivering. That’s why Mama Skins sent for me. ‘Go get that gal before she get herself killed,’ she said. Mama Skins probably saved your life.” Ella doesn’t say so much as a thank-you, no smile or nothing. Agnes hefts her up, positions, and push-pulls her through the thick woods. Every few trees Agnes catches herself humming. No, if she wants silence, I can be silent. There’s the rock Little James fell from last planting season. That’s where mamas go to pray for babies that ain’t never been. There’s where babies lay while they wait on their mamas to join them. Won’t tell that haughty gal nothing. Let her stew in her own breathing and that loud beat-beating of her heart. Her chest hardly moving but her heart pounding like a dying calf. Nope, won’t tell her one thing.
The scent of the river fills her. The promise of washing away dirt, hurt, and anger flows over rocks, through passages. It bubbles and swirls. Invites. Halfway between the house and the cabins, the river is a meeting place for Walker’s slaves. The Washing Up place where pots and clothes from the house and pots and clothes from the cabins are scrubbed, soaked, boiled, and seasoned. The only place slaves from the house can talk freely with field hands.
“This where I go to be free,” Agnes says. She can’t stop the words from coming out. She’s just not selfish like some folk, stingy with words. She sits down on the edge of the riverbank and lets her feet dangle in the water.
Ella slumps down beside her.
“This river comes from up north,” she continues. “If I sit right here when the moon is bright and the river is high, the water from the north mix with the water from the south and in that very spot, I’m free.”
Ella’s laugh, a low rumble, pierces the air.
“That’s one ugly laugh,” Agnes says. “You ought not to do it too often.” She crosses her arms, tilts her chin, purses her lips and thinks of all the things she will never tell Ella. She turns her back on her. At the edge, water laps at her toes. Dried leaves tickle her fingertips. Above, blue sky peeks through tangles of branches. Animals scurry all around. Bunnies, a deer or two. Nothing to be afraid of. Lessin you wasn’t from around here. How far is this gal from home? Who’d she leave behind? Did she have a mama like Mama Skins waiting on her? A papa like Papa Jonah, quick with a laugh, a kind word? Is she supposed to share them? She’ll help in the fields, maybe the house, Master Walker had said. Just like that. Agnes is supposed to be the one to go to the house. Mama Skins had promised. Who else but Agnes can carry two pots of boiling water from the river to the house faster than it can cool? She can carry more firewood than Little James, polish longer than Meredith, scrub as hard as Mantha, cook better than them too if she has a mind to it. Now all that means nothing. She’ll be back in the fields soon as this gal learns her place. This girl’s grating on her nerves. She isn’t nothing but trouble.
“If you was free like Mama Skins and them says, what you doing here?” she asks. “You here to take my mama and papa, you gonna have a hard way to go. You think you gonna come here and work in the house and leave me to the fields, I’m gonna stop you right there. I’m the one gonna work in the house. You hear?”
Ella moans.
“Good. Mama Skins and them says you here to birth babies, seeings none of us can.”
Shaking her head, Ella sits up too fast, clutches her side, rises to her feet.
“They say the ones Master keeps is gonna work in the field soon’s they can walk. But they’ll be yours. Unless they get sold away.”
Ella doubles over.
“No, wherever they be, they be yours.”
Sobs ripple through Ella’s body, pouring out of her mouth.
In her fourteen years, Agnes has seen a lot of pain.
“You don’t want to birth no babies, do you?” she whispers. Ella slides down to the thick grass, she crawls to the riverbank. At the edge, she slips her feet into the water. Her body rocks back and forth, back and forth. The river ebbs and flows, swells and rises. Over there a leaf swirls in lazy circles.
A ways off a thick branch is swallowed whole.
“It ain’t deep all the way through,” Agnes says. “I studied it. Know its dips and turns like I know my o
wn.” She places a hand on her hip.
Ella leans forward.
She wouldn’t jump in. Only a fool would jump in the middle of a river buck-naked in broad daylight. Agnes leans back to make shapes with the clouds. “See that fluffy one over there?” She raises one hand to shield her eyes and points with the other. “That looks just like a bushel of apples from the Missus’s garden. You try it. What that one look like to you?”
With hardly a splash Ella slips in.
That heifer better can swim. The tide pulls her to the middle of the river. Her arms and legs go every which way. Agnes doesn’t know whether to laugh or jump in after her.
Ella doesn’t holler or ask for help. She just flops there like to drown in knee-deep brackish water.
“You trying to kill yourself?”
Ella’s arms and legs flail. Water rains fat droplets onto Agnes’s good dress.
“You gonna have to try harder than that you want to get somewhere,” Agnes says. She scoots closer to the edge of the bank.
The river sucks and pulls at Ella. Mama, Agnes practices, I was sitting there and she was sitting there and then she wasn’t. I only got the one good dress and with it being three days till the next washing day, I couldn’t get it dirtied up. Agnes inspects her dress. She fingers the streaks of mud and grass stains.
“Stand up, you fool girl!” she yells.
Can she even hear her over the splash she’s making? Agnes watches Ella’s tiny chest crumple in and out. Now she’s gone and made herself cry. She slips off her shift, steps out of her underthings and slides in the cold water. Agnes lets the water pull her down to the clay bottom. The sand sucks her skin and squishes beneath her feet. She holds her breath and counts to ten. She keeps her head underwater and lets her body rise to the surface. The sun warms her back as she breaks through the water’s skin. Slowly Agnes lets her feet sink to the bottom and stands up.
“You go out too far the river will suck you clear through the bottom. I seen it happen. Swallowed whole men. What you think it do to a gal like you? It ain’t gonna carry you home if that’s what you thinking and I can’t let it take you nowhere no how. Mama Skins said bring you home. I’m gonna bring you home. After that, we just have to wait and see.”
Remembered Page 5
