by Jeffrey Lent
He sat at the table across from where she worked, his good arm up on the table, palm flat, the stump of the other flat against his side, the cauterized tip still swaddled with bandage that seeped a clear pus that yellowed in the cloth. He was a pretty boy, with a pouched lower lip and his father’s ginger hair swept back in ordered waves from his forehead. His skin was smooth, made more so by faint feathers of beard. His crumpled clothes gave the idea he no longer cared how he looked. She continued ironing, not looking up at him, pressing the same shirt slowly over with a cool iron. She couldn’t help but wonder about the missing arm, where it was, what had happened to it. She only knew it had been removed, what fragments and pieces of it were left. She still thought of it as a whole thing. Sure a part of his soul had been lost with that arm. Wondered where that hand was and what it grasped for. His other hand on the table, fingers drumming now. She knew he was waiting for her to look at him. It was too hot in the kitchen and she broke sweat.
“What’s to eat?”
She didn’t look up, her arm still moving. “Same as always. Field peas, turnips, collards, some cornbread. All of it cold though.”
“Colored food.”
She shrugged, still not looking at him. “It’s what they is. You want better you should’ve gone off with the rest of them.”
“Yes,” he said. “I spect they’re eating oysters and champagne. Beefsteak maybe.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is what’s here.”
His fingers drummed hard and fast on the tabletop, then stopped. “Get me something to eat.”
“I’m working.”
“You already ironed that thing three times.”
She stayed quiet.
He said, “Get me some dinner.”
“I’m busy. You feed yourself.”
“Look at me.”
“I done looked at you. You still able to feed yourself, I can see.”
He slapped his hand on the table hard. “Goddammit, I said look at me.”
She stepped away to the stove and placed the cold iron on it and brought a hot one back and set it on the end of the board. She took up the shirt and folded it and placed it on the pile and dipped to lift another from the basket and laid it over the board. Then she looked at him and said, “What you want, Mister Lex?”
A shroud of darkness ran over his boy’s face, not strong enough to break the softness of his skin but something laced through the muscles beneath the surface, a tautness there; and for the first time she feared him. This fear angered her and so angry at the manchild before her she only said again, “What you want, Mister Lex?” This time the title over her tongue the juice of a bitter weed.
“You know what Mama told me before they all lit out for Raleigh?”
She said nothing. His eyes dark, wet.
“She told me there was nobody but myself to blame. I said I was just trying to do my part. She told me I was a fool, my part wasn’t anything I thought it was, nobody’s part was what they thought it was anymore. She said we all had new parts coming and not one of us could know what they was. But we could be smart enough to figure out to wait until they was revealed. And me sitting there like this and her telling me that. Like she was angry at me. Like she somehow blamed me. Like she blamed me for the future somehow.”
Leah said, “She a tough woman,” and didn’t know she knew this until she said it.
His eyes shot from her face as if she’d said nothing. He said, “It was mostly old men and boys like me. What men there was was worn out. Cold like you never known. Grown men barefoot in the wintertime. When the fight come each one lit up with a rage. Men furious wild with right. One minute you’re red as bears’ eyes and the next you’re flat on the ground with the world all gone to pain and men climbing over you running and you thinking about your daddy sitting on his fat ass down there and knowing it’s men like him that keep this thing going at the same time you know somehow it’s men like him keep it from working. My arm wasn’t nothing next to that. It made me sit up and puke. It still makes me want to puke.”
She was ironing again. She didn’t want to talk about his father. She said, “Seems to me your mama was maybe right.”
“What’s that mean?”
Picking her way. “It don’t mean nothing. Just, things change. Folks get used to most anything.”
He was quiet a little while, watching her. She was wet under her arms and could smell herself and guessed he could too. After a bit he said, “Know what I saw coming back down home?”
She folded the shirt and turned to the stove with the iron and set it there and turned back, standing now before the stove, a pace away from the table. “What’d you see?”
“Come across a pair of wagons. Hooped over with canvas covers, a skinny old team of oxen hitched up to each wagon. The wagons filled up with house stuff, feather ticks and furniture, nothing too big but all of it looked nice what I could see. Old men and little children and women in the wagons. Six men bareback on mules carrying pitchforks and hog-butchering knives, one with a scythe. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t think nothing. Lots people moving round now.”
“They was all niggers. A whole troop of niggers. Heading north in broad daylight. In ox wagons with pilfered belongings. Going what? Six-eight miles a day? Some great old escape. A dash to freedom. Two of the ones on muleback rode up with their rusted weapons with edges whetted to shine like water and sat there and asked me what I was doing. ‘What you wanting here white boy,’ they said to me. ‘Jus keep moving on,’ they said. ‘Jus keep one foot front of the other and you’ll get your little white ass on home.’ And I didn’t say nothing to em, just kept walking right on by those spavined mules and them old wagons and them oxen near dead anyhow and didn’t look back at em, the whole time feeling those pitchfork tines running right on through my lungs, knowing they was looking at me like they’d like to do that. I went on all day until it was dark and never met anybody looking for em at all. Them out there in broad daylight, brazen as that. Like they was riding angels not oxen to the skinny bosom of Lincoln himself. Like there wasn’t near the whole state of Virginia to get through and it filled up with thousands of men all too happy to shoot runaway niggers. They going along serious but easy too, like it was just what they was doing. I bet them women and old men setting up there on those ticks even went along singing. What do you think about that?”
She stepped away from the stove and went and stood before the door where it was cooler. Now just down the side of the table from him. She felt her breathing, a tremble along her ribcage. His eyes wide, focused on her, each an even distribution of mockery and anger. Back in the house a clock struck six, the tones each separate and round with brass clarity. She could picture the clock, the cherubs twining to reach from the pedestal to hold up the sphere of time. She said, “Ain’t no business of mine what those folks up to.”
“I wasn’t asking what you thought they was up to.”
“What you asking then?”
“What do you think?”
She pushed off the door and took a step toward the table, toward him, and stopped. She folded her arms over her chest and said, “Why you messing with me? Why you can’t just leave me be?”
He ran his fingertips over the boards of the tabletop like stroking the strings of an instrument. Then he put his elbow on the table and held his chin with his hand. “Free,” he said. “That old freedom song. That old road north. That what you want, Leah?”
She shrugged her shoulders, still holding herself. The sweat chill against her now, the smell rising now fear sharp as chopped onion.
He went on. “How do you think that would be? I bet you ain’t even thought that far. I bet you think you get up north and those folks sweep you up like long-lost cousins and set you up pretty in a little house and bring you food and clothes and pretty little things to set around the house, little knickknacks. And take you on into their church and let their god sweep down onto you and raise you up to provi
dence? And let their sons walk out afternoons with you and bring you home and feed you dinner and then let them marry you. You think it’s going to be like that? Or maybe you think you’ll just set right here and we can swap places. You all would move on in here and wear my mother’s clothes and maybe even set up on the back gallery and look down at her on her hands and knees weeding out the vegetable patch, and Daddy would drive you all whenever you took a whim to go downtown and pass some new law what white folks could or could not do. Maybe you think it’s going to be like that. Maybe you think that old stick rail reading off a piece of paper in another country going to change things here and maybe you think this sweet country that’s home to you and me both is falling apart and you’re going to get whatever you want. I bet that’s it. I bet that’s what you think it will be. I’m right, ain’t I? Stand there like a free woman and speak the truth to me for once in your life, like a proud free woman would do. Come on now.”
“I don’t think nothing about it.” And then bold and scared by his words she said, her voice low to a mumble, “I reckon I’d work. Work like I do now, maybe here, maybe some other place. I don’t know. But for myself. So my work all my own. But I don’t know a thing about it. You and me both, Alex, we don’t know what’s coming, what it mean.”
His face blackened over, and she knew he’d wanted to hear something else from her, some fear of clinging to what she knew. And thought how young he was and clear and bright with danger. Thinking of those glistening pitchfork tines he’d spoken of.
He still held his chin but his legs were spread long out beside the table, crossed at the ankles. His stump lying flat against his side. He said, “You’re a stupid bitch. Ain’t anything going to change. Not one goddamn thing. It might get all rearranged but it ain’t going to change. You’ll still be a nigger girl and the rest of the world’ll still be white. Nothing going to change.”
She nodded as if agreeing, all the while sure he was wrong in some way she couldn’t explain to him. So all she said was, “We’ll see, I guess. Comes to that.”
He nodded back and she saw he was not agreeing either. He looked at her, a long pause until her feet became sore with wanting to move under his look. Then he grinned at her and said, “So tell me: When old Spence was home last two Novembers ago did he screw you? I’m just curious. He talked about it. Said you was ripe and ready for it. But he never said he had. So did he?”
And she was rigid again upright between table and door, sweating again and thinking of Spencer. Slender tall and well made with his mother’s frame but their daddy’s ginger hair and hawked nose. His eyes also. It was Spencer the one the summer she was twelve who found her crouched in tangled honeysuckle and briar canes in the grown-over lot off a lane three streets away, found her in the high green summer dusk with her arms locked around her knees rocking and leaning against the red oak growing in the side of the lot, away from the cellar hole of the house burned out before either of them were born, found her with her dress torn and blooded and streaked with the red clay, the clay matted also in her hair and grimed on her face, caked there like mud with her crying, rocking back and forth and shaking and crying in the hot summer-still dusk, everything around them very quiet but for a dog barking some streets away. She heard him coming, heard him calling her name just above a whisper so she knew he knew where to find her and why and so she sat still and did not run, her head still down on her arms but waiting for him as he stepped through the tall grass and briars straight on to the tree not to the cellar hole as if he’d thought it through since hearing whatever he’d heard. Knowing she’d be there, as if he’d asked himself how far he’d go and where that would be if something like that happened to him. And came to her and knelt down with a boy’s clumsy tenderness and held her head against his thin chest until her fresh crying stopped, Spencer not speaking but crooning soft like to a child and after her crying stopped he lifted her to her feet and led her through the lanes and backyards, cutting through as straight a line as he could to home and still avoid anyone out in the evening. His colt’s legs slowed to a cautious easy pace for her until they came through the back garden gate off the lane and her mother came off the stepstone before the cabin door and ran to her. Spencer then followed to the cabin door and reached to touch Helen’s shoulder and say, “I just want you to know I didn’t have nothing to do with this. I went and got her soon’s I heard word of it.” And her mother turning swift and saying, “Leave us be! Don’t you talk to nobody about this, not your daddy, not nobody!” And her mother talking nonstop after the door closed in her hushed whisper of white boys, white men, as she lifted the dress from Leah and bathed her standing naked no longer bleeding in the center of the cabin, her hands gentle against the harsh bitten-off flow of her words, each word dropping like a small fleck of the dried blood from Leah’s thighs. Leah not listening but crying silent and remembering only that he’d come as soon as he’d heard.
And Spencer home that last time two Novembers ago, silent and restless around the house and yard as if he no longer knew how to relax around people. The day Leah found him sitting one knee crossed over the other on a stump of firewood behind the garden shed, when she came from the garden to hang the fork she’d been using to dig the Irish potatoes for dinner the next day, Spencer wearing only the trousers from his uniform and an open-necked white shirt of his father’s, the pants already worn and patched but nothing like the wornout home-dyed stuff she’d see on men in the years to come. He was smoking a short thin cigar wrapped in black leaf, leaning back so the stump tilted under him and blowing the smoke out into the quiescent golden air of late fall, and she saw he was waiting for her and he said, “Hey girl, how you been?” and took the fork from her and hung it on the nail. She told him she’d been fine and asked about him, but he only stepped to her and took her by the upper arms and held her with her back against the shed wall and leaned and kissed her, his mouth soft, pliable against hers, lips easy against her and she held her mouth still against his kiss not stiff or remote but as if just waiting until he figured out he was doing the wrong thing. He lifted his lips from hers and grazed against her cheek, the soft ends of his mustache slipping along the folds of her nose as if they belonged there and the moment his mouth was gone from hers she wanted it back and she reached her mouth up to find his, her mouth open once she covered his and he groaned against her as his body slipped forward and pressed over the length of her and she moved a little against him. He drank at her mouth as his hands came off her shoulders across where her throat spread to her breastbone and down to hold her breasts through the cotton shirtwaist, the weak sun coming into her eyes spangling over his shoulder and the air sweet as lying down and she closed her eyes as a sound came rising up from deep below her lungs and sliding from her mouth into his and he stopped, his hands falling from her as he reared back his head and looked at her, his eyes wide with pride and sadness, longing gone hollow as if he stood outside himself watching not just himself but the both of them and he placed his hands on the shed and pushed away from her, pushed his body back to stand over his own feet and not against her anymore and he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry Leah. I’m so sorry.” Stood like that looking at her and her looking back at him for a long moment and she not saying anything and when he saw she would not and seemed to know all that was running through her he turned away, his eyes at the last terrible and sad, and he went to bend by the stump and pick up the gone-out cigar and walked down along the garden to the back gate and out into the lane. She stood where she was, her legs trembling and her mind hot with not being able to think, watching after where he’d gone and after a moment she could smell faint the smoke floating back, a sieve of scent from him already gone and she looked at her hands, still smeared with clay from picking out the potatoes and rubbed them against the front of the apron over her skirt and then wound her fingers tight together and wrung them, watching the edges of the joints turn a pale whiteblue against the pressure, and out loud she said “Stupid” and walked back out to t
he garden to lift up the basket of potatoes and go to the kitchen.
And stood now in that same kitchen facing his younger brother and thinking what he’d said of Spencer was likely true, knowing enough to know people held many versions and forms revolving like trials around their own true self; but saw now that there was something wrong with that brother’s eyes, too wet, too dark, too wide, as if his brain worked at unusual speed and his eyes raced to keep pace with the workings behind them, and with great and true calm she said, “Spencer always was good to me. Was a gentleman. Treated me right. Treated me like a sister.” Her own eyes steady on him as she said this, feeling undistorted and stalwart to something she couldn’t put name to but emotion, one of love and memory combined, sentiment from her as pitch to amber from a loblolly pine. Knowing the manchild before her would not understand this or would not be able to allow understanding and was patient with serenity before his reaction.
