The Loom (15 page)

The heard the turmoil before she reached the door.

Lydia chased the screams around the winding dirt path to the front steps of the house. A crowd of slaves hovered together, clutching each other in the center of the withered grass. Trembling hands raced from backs, to shoulders, to faces in a haze of blue and brown burlap and denim. Heads bowed. Others tilted upward toward the high porch. Shouted prayers and quiet wails echoed in the early-morning wind from the saddest faces Lydia had ever seen.

John was in the crowd.

“What is it?” Lydia touched his back. “Can you see what it is?”

“Some White men.” He stretched up on the balls of his feet and strained to see. “They have a slave.” His eyes widened.

“What is it?”

He shook his head but his eyes filled with tears.

“What do you see, John?” Lydia moved closer, pressing on the backs of those in front of her. “Please…what is it?”

“Go back, Lydia. Go around back and get in the house.”

“What are you talking about? Why?”

“Lydia, listen to me.” He said “Lydia” strong but the rest of his words shook. “Lydia! Go inside.” He grabbed her arm, but the pain in his voice drew her deeper into the crowd and she shook free. She could not see what clenched her people tighter, what caused a few to fall to their knees. She pushed aside winding skirts and pressed her way to the front.

She stumbled back.

Daddy was shirtless, his hands bound behind him. Two men in straw hats, white sleeves shoved over their forearms, swaggered around him. Their mouths in angry lines spat words Lydia strained to hear.

The tan, bearded one grabbed her father’s hands and jerked him straight. He yanked on his jacket pocket and with a quick twist of his hand, flicked a shiny blade against a face that remained oddly calm.

Screams and gasps filled the crowd but Lydia’s screech pierced through the uproar. Impulse shot through her veins. She sprinted up the steps, her tears flying hot into her ears.

“Daddy!”

Lydia watched her father’s eyes widen, his chest rise and fall.

“That’s my baby. Get my girl out of here!”

The stouter man swung his fist into her father’s jaw. The force knocked his hat loose. It drifted to the ground and landed with a thud in the dirt.

Lydia grappled for her father. “Daddy!” She needed him. If they hurt him, if they hurt her daddy… They couldn’t hurt him.

She was almost at the top when she was swept off her feet. Arms wrapped around her torso. She kicked herself free and fell two steps back. She gripped the step above her and pulled herself to her knees. An arm swung under hers on each side. Two men, like Daddy, lifted and carried her toward the weeping below.

Lydia swung. She bucked. She tried to bite, but she was still flying backward. The men stopped several steps above the crowd and held her by her arms.

A flicker of ivory drew Lydia’s eyes upward. In a window to the right, a curtain was drawn. With parted lips, Mrs. Kelly stood like a ghost. Like she was somehow asleep or playing Lydia’s childhood frozen bedtime game and winning without effort. Chills rushed through her as she watched the one constant. Moving forces all around, but here in this one space, stillness. The missus’s eyes were on her father, but with little sign she saw him. She couldn’t possibly see him struggle and not move, not do something.

Suddenly, Mrs. Kelly’s eyes met hers.

“Please,” she begged the image in the window.

Lizzy’s mother clapped her hand on her mouth as if sickness was rushing to her lips and stumbled forward, her fingers sprawled against the glass.

Please… She was her only hope.

Hope closed the curtains and walked away.

Lydia collapsed in the arms of her husband. She looked back at her daddy. Beautiful Daddy. The one who meant everything to her. How could she live without him? She reached for him, weak now, with a single arm in the air. If she could reach him, touch him somehow, she would live. “Daddy.” A hot, salty tear burned her tongue as she whispered for him.

If John saw what she saw, he would release her to him. His eyes of unwavering love, her name on his lips, and glistening tears that slid, slow and steady, down his jawbone. My daddy…

“No! No… Please. Please!” But she couldn’t touch him, as much as she willed it.

Lydia glimpsed Dr. Kelly on the porch before she was half-carried, half-dragged to her father’s cabin and draped in the lap of the only blood she had left.

Never would she forget the sound of Grandma Lou’s wailing. It rang high-pitched above the other mourners within the walls of their cabin, though her normal tone flowed thick as honey.

Brown faces surrounded her, their eyes saying what their lips refused to repeat. Arms embraced and hands caressed, but nothing stopped Lydia’s head from shaking.

“Sit her down,” one woman instructed, pulling her toward the crate, but Lydia’s body refused to bend.

“Give her some water,” another suggested, but she could not drink.

Lydia shook her head faster and faster, her hands pressed against her ears, trying to shake herself awake from this day of torment, this hour of anguish.

The solemn faces swayed back and forth before her like a turbulent sea. A quivering in the center of her stomach rose until it sat salty in the back of her throat.

“I need my daddy.”

“You gonna be all right.”

“I need my daddy.”

“I know.”

“Daddy…”

“Hush now.”

Sobbing heaved from her chest until her eyes rolled back and all color faded to black.

Lydia awoke beside her grandmother to the smell of okra, onions, and tomatoes steaming in a cast-iron skillet.

A basket of vegetables sat on the table. A gift. A gift already for the bereaving. Please, God, no.

Only two remained, John and Cora, lingering near the hearth.

“Where is he? What happened to my daddy?”

“You need to eat something,” Cora urged.

“Please… Please!”

“He’s gone, Lydia,” John said, his head between his hands.

No.

Her grandmother closed her eyes. When she opened them, tears glistened in wavy streams down the maple mountains of her cheeks. She turned to Cora. “Tell me. I wanna know. Tell me what they did to my boy.”

“One of master’s men…” Cora looked down, spoke slowly. “He said he needed to teach him a lesson. Teach us all a lesson.”

Cora’s lip quivered. “Slashed his face. Heard they threw his body in the Potomac when they was through.”

“I ain’t even got his body. I ain’t even got my baby’s body.” Lou’s sniffling erupted into sobs, deep and hollow.

Cora rushed to her side and wrapped her arms around her. Together, they rocked to the rhythm of their weeping.

Lydia couldn’t breathe. She sprinted out of the cabin past the other slave quarters and the tobacco fields. She stopped when she saw the pink-streaked sky and tumbled to her knees. Its beauty stung. How can it not weep with me? She knelt alone, fatherless, outside in a world unscathed by a broken heart.

Lou fought sleep like the devil it was.

Sneaking up on her, tempting her to close her eyes, alluring her with a gift it never gave. Rest never came on nights of terror.

Tonight, her first night without her son, she wouldn’t dare shut her eyes. Isaiah could come strolling in at any moment, surprising everybody, telling the tale of how he escaped, fled from evil, and made it home. The Lord had done much greater things, hadn’t He?

She wouldn’t sleep and miss her son. Or clothe her mind in those awful pictures of him Cora had shared. Why had she asked?

Why did she need to know they had cut him, sliced her baby’s face? She shuddered. No, that devil wasn’t going to sneak up on her and force her to see her boy all bloody and beaten like an animal. My baby…

She wouldn’t do it. She wasn’t going to let sleep win. Every time a wave of exhaustion bowed her head forward, she spoke to it.

“Liar,” she said when her lids grew heavy, “Yea, though I walk through the valley…,” she slurred when her chin bobbed against her chest.

Her mother had given her these words to hide on the inside, said it was all she had to give. Even then, Lou knew it was enough.

In and out of liquid thoughts, she roused herself until light spilled through the cracks of their log house and onto the face of her grandbaby. The girl, balled up on her side, made Lou cry all over again.

She looked around. John and Cora had slipped away.

She needed to do something. Keep herself busy. That’s how they were going to make it. One tied-up moment after the other until the good Lord called them home.

Lou strapped the faded, striped apron around her waist and marched to the crate in the kitchen, pulling out flour, lard, and sugar. In a wooden bowl, she tossed handfuls and pinches until she stirred a yellow dough that stuck to the back of her spoon.

Isaiah loved tea cakes.

“Just one more, Mama,” he would plead when he was no taller than her waist. Though she knew they needed the extra for supper, she always gave in.

“Just one more, Isaiah,” she whispered after the other slaves cleared the table and hurried out the cabin to their day’s duty.

Giggling, he would skip out on their heels, clutching the fat, round biscuit against his chest.

“Grandma?”

Lou turned to Lydia’s drowsy face, still pressed and pulled by slumber like the dough in her hand.

“Why you cooking, Grandma?”

“What do you mean, why am I cooking? We got to eat, ain’t we?” Lou looked at the sad eyes, dropped her hand from her hip, and confessed. “Granny’s gotta keep her hands busy, baby. Got to stay busy.”

But the lack of sleep was getting to her. Like an old bandit, it crept in, entered one finger at a time. Her hands trembled. She shook them steady.

She brushed against Lydia as she made her way to the hearth. Didn’t make a lick of sense how they were all bunched up in the smallest of spaces with the large quarters the master had. Didn’t make no sense at all.

“Grandma?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Why’d they kill my daddy?”

“Oh, baby.” Lou’s withered hands pounded the sugary flour into perfect circles. Yes. They were perfect. Whatever her hand found to do…

Taste was one thing, the expected thing, that had to be present at every meal. Food with flavor was vital. Not much more pleasure a slave had, but making each dish pleasing to the eye thrilled her more. Why not take the time and make the patties as round as she could? Not too many she knew cared about those type of details. Not like she did. If she’d done it for a master for years, why not for her own? With what little her family had, her special touch made it all the better.

But now the more she worked, the more she shook. “Do something, child.” When Lydia propped herself against the chair, she handed her a patty. “Knead this.”

Lou tossed the dough from palm to palm. She kept her eyes on her work and off Lydia. Where eyes focused, the mind would follow.

“I needed him.”

She tried to ignore it, but she saw it. A single tear sped down Lydia’s cheek before others raced to join it. She smudged them with the back of her hand and sniffed. “We needed him.”

“I know, baby. We did. Granny knows.”

Lou glimpsed the girl from the corner of her eye and a chill shot through her. Her son sat, young, innocent, unbroken. She shuddered back into the present. Her granddaughter. She wanted to reach for her but if she stopped—if her hands stopped moving—

she would feel the burning, the ripping of soul from spirit. She tossed instead and blocked the words, the thoughts, the feelings.

“It’s not right.”

If the girl would stop talking…

“What ain’t right? Hurting your daddy? No, ’course it ain’t.” What happened to her perfect circles? Girl sure didn’t take after her. “You ain’t doing it right, Lydia. Take it like this.” She pressed into the tea cakes. “Push your palm in deeper.”

“I mean all of it. Treating us like we don’t matter. Like we don’t cry. Like we don’t bleed. Like we don’t have the same needs they got.”