Kind One (11 page)

“Yes, I expect you would have tried, I can see that,” I said. “Only there was no way to know where I was. No road through the woods to find me. Only breadcrumbs to lay on the ground and birds weighting down all the branches above.”

He was quiet after I’d said this and even quieter after what I said next. “And if you had found me, it might not have been me you chose to help.”

The next day in the forenoon he asked me to clasp hands in the parlor with him and pray. Then he asked me to be his wife. Those and their cousins, said right and by the right body, are kind words. I don’t know any kinder. And I told my employer Lucious Wilson that. Then I told him no. I could not stand by him as he had asked. I told him I had been down in hell and that hell was not a place you left no matter how far you hauled your bones away from it. It had found me in his school shed and it had found me in the passage of his house and it would find me again. I was not fit to be his or anyone else’s wife, I told him. I looked him all the time in the eye as I said this. Then I went to pack my bag. Lucious Wilson came and stood in the doorway a long while watching me. He lit his pipe and breathed of it and the smoke came out into the room.

If I could have gathered myself up and turned into smoke then I would have. I would have joined my smoke to his and drifted on out the window and stuck for a while to the floors Lucious Wilson walked on and to the walls where he leaned his hands. There is a fragrance to a good pipe smoke I have always been partial to.

There is a pipe here in this very room I will sometimes pull out and take a chew on. I do not light my pipe. I do not chuck it full of tobacco. I think of the smoke Lucious Wilson put out into the room, even all those years ago now, and how I stood there and worked over my few things and my bag. Some of the times as I chew on my pipe I bite down hard and play it that I did gather myself up that day and did turn to smoke, and that as I drifted he breathed me in then blew me out fresh into his arms. He carried me away then down the hall and out of this world to another where you can put all that you’ve hurt and all that’s hurt you behind like an old cracked honey jar. I expect I was already dreaming some of that as I stood there at my bed. Where would that place be and who would have arms strong enough to carry you there? I expect I thought.

He spoke his soft, good things to me one more time, and one more time I told him no. Then he knocked out his pipe, nodded, and said, “All right now, Sue, I’ll not trouble you longer,” and told me to put my things back on the shelf.

This morning there was a light-skinned colored man come riding down the road that cuts through the middle of Lucious Wilson’s lands and leads right up past the front porch of this little house. He had on a gray hat and gray suit, and his horse wasn’t wanting for being combed and curried. Just like a prince on the palace grounds he looked. You couldn’t have told he was colored but I could see it, in the eyebrows, in the handsome oils of his hair. I was out airing my carcass in the springtime breezes, and when he passed on by me he nodded and lifted his hat and I nodded back, and I said to myself, “Colored man, go safe.”

I did say this.

I don’t ask that you believe me or that you don’t.

A body believes what it will and wants to. There is no rule to any of it. No recipe.

When I was coming up north out of my four-square kingdom, I feared the day and walked the dark, but when I saw folks I fluttered toward them like I was a moth and they were some fine snack of light. Still, there wasn’t any wayfarer would have me long enough to take a good look. What was there to have? Some rags and flaps of skin with curly horns sprouting out of its head? Scary Sue come running up out of Charlotte County. Out of Paradise with its weathers fair.

I come upon a child one of those evenings I was walking. I crossed a creek and had froth on my rags and come on that pretty child playing with a spoon and biscuit and set it to screaming. Not a night later a man with a knife and a coonskin on his head crawled up on me in the dark, but when I stood into the moonlight and he saw what he was stalking he crawled away again.

On the banks of the Ohio River I parlayed in the moonlight with a ferryman who looked me up and looked me down and said he needed no coin from me because I had already paid. I had the black bark in my pocket, he said, and the black bark in my pocket meant
pass.
It didn’t matter where I went, where I thought I could go. I could change my apron anytime I wanted to and it would still be there waiting in my pocket. He knew. He had two sisters who came up as he was talking and took me back to where they did their washing and scrubbed me down like I was just some old clothes to fret on the board. One of them had a frock to spare, and she dropped it over my head when they were done. The other had a pair of boots to put on my feet, and she put them there. Neither a one of them spoke a word as they did this.

The ferryman had me climb up on his boat directly they were finished with me. After we had crossed and I had set my foot on hard dirt, he told me, “Go safe now, Mother,” and I turned and saw it was Alcofibras sitting there, his hands covered in eyes and raised up off the oars into the mist.

“Where have you taken me, Alcofibras?” I asked him.

“Go on now, Mother,” he said.

I walked for another week, and when I got back to my father’s house I found him and my mother gone and their house with my corner in it burned to the ground. I’d worn my rotten boots out getting there and went barefoot over to Evansville. There was talk everywhere about war. Young men with drink in them bunched up in lines and marched along the thoroughfare. There was considerable discharging of rifles. I told it when they asked that I had walked up out of fire. Not out of Charlotte County, Kentucky. Not out of Paradise and murder.

THAT DAY WE SAW OFF
Bennett Marsden I went back into the kitchen like I’ve already said. I had on my dress and had my clean hands, and because I thought what we had been cooking up for Bennett Marsden was still sitting on the stove, I stood up straight when I got to the table and I told Zinnia to sit. I told her to sit, and she looked at me like there was lightning and thunder to come, but she sat. Then I told Cleome to walk down the hall to Linus Lancaster’s room and fetch a wallet out of a drawer she would find half hidden in the chifforobe. Cleome said she would not walk into Linus Lancaster’s room, and who was I to be handing out orders. I told her again. Zinnia nodded. Cleome went and fetched it. When she got it to the table I took it from her, told her to sit, and opened it up past its few notions to a portrait in a leather frame. That was a photographic portrait of a lady wearing a hat.

“Linus Lancaster, my late husband who is gone now to his pigs and glory, liked to show us this,” I said. I showed it up to Cleome then to Zinnia. “He liked to hold this up to us like I’m holding this up to you now, and he liked to say everything he’d ever loved in this world and everything he’d ever hoped to bring to his piece of paradise was in this frame. This was usually after his singing nights. When he had been at the jug. Do you remember this?”

“All right,” said Zinnia. She said this without moving her lips, without moving her eyes, which had lingered only a moment on the portrait, from mine. Cleome said nothing.

“All right,” I said, then pulled the first piece of tin up out of the frame and revealed the second behind it and held it up in its turn. Cleome and Zinnia looked at each other then at me.

“I found this second one just this winter,” I said.

Neither one of them said a word. Only looked at me. There was a cold breeze at my ankles. It tickled at the bruises there. Rose up hackles on my neck.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I just wish to say that to you both now. That is what I wish to say.”

“Sorry about what?” said Cleome.

Zinnia reached into her apron, pulled the pig sticker out, and, holding it lengthwise, looked at it close.

“If he was sitting here with us, I would stand and put this right back into his neck,” she said.

“It would slide easy into that neck,” she said.

“Sloooosh now, Mother,” she said.

Cleome gave out a little laugh. There was a tear on her face. One silver drop. We all three of us watched it move down her cheek, around the mole, down her neck. There was a first fly buzzing by the door. It spoke of insects hatching everywhere. Things hidden inching up. Once upon a time the three of us had played a game to see who could spot the first wild crocus, the first mosquito, the first open bud. I almost said “First fly!” even knowing that whatever we had been cooking up for Bennett Marsden, the Draper Man, had gone cold and crumpled like heavy old biscuits to put holes through the floor.

Cleome put a hand on her stomach and looked at me.

“Sorry about what, Mother?” she whispered. “What do you have to be sorry for?”

They fed me awhile then took me back out to the shed.

There was a reverend at the little church here awhile back who taught it that in your beginnings are your endings, and that when you hit your endings you have just begun. He taught it every Sunday like that, twisting it up with David and Moses and Josiah and every one of the apostles, and you should have seen them all scratching their heads and nodding and shaking the reverend’s hand when he was done. Now one of those Sundays while he was telling it about Mary and leaving off her one sorry life to get started on her blessed other, my head lolled, and as he discussed this I chased my way into thinking about my father and how he was in the early days before the war had ravished off his foot. Our little place in Indiana was a sunny place in those days, and my father liked to pick me up and give me a twirl. He had been in battles before and had his marks to prove it, but they hadn’t yet found a way to take away his foot from him, and he liked to tell stories about his wars and the wide world in which he had fought them.

“You think the world is this big,” my father would say and hold his hands one across from the other. “But it’s really this big,” he would say and stretch his hands as far as he could apart. “It’s that big and then some and on across the oceans until you get back to where you set off. We could hitch up that wagon and roll it until the horses died of old age in their harnesses and we wouldn’t have even gotten started. I’ve seen ladies taking their tea in ships in harbors it would take a week to sail across and boys racing up trees they said were a thousand years old. Someday we’re going to ride it on out of here and plant our flag in the Kansas Territories or the Oregon country or sail right off to China. They make maps so we think we can understand the size of it but we can’t.”

My father came into my school where I sat in the front row and wasn’t yet a wife to my mother’s second cousin or an oatmeal scrubber or a pretend teacher or anything at all, and he made a speech about the world to us. The Lord had given us eyes to see with and feet to get us to where it could all be seen, he said. It was up to us to go out and see, to go out and consider. That was our work. We ought to strap up our shoes and set to it. The worst we could do was fail. And all fail meant was we had grit enough to try. We all clapped when he had finished and he gave a bow.

Then my father put on his belt and went off to a battle and took a tomahawk or some such in his foot, and they cut that foot off of him and threw it out into the field for the crows.

“I could see them out there after it from my sickbed,” he said. “It wasn’t even the best of them made off with the biggest part.”

Those last days in the shed my father’s foot came down out of those crows’ stomachs and reconstituted itself and kept me company. Does a foot shorn of its leg sit or stand? I put that query to it, but it didn’t answer. There was more ankle and leg to it than I would have thought. Once or twice it fell over on its side. Its heel was cracked. You could have planted fine rows of seeds in those cracks. Could have watered them and tended them and had a springtime show. I thought this. And I said it aloud. Or thought I did.

Does your father’s lost foot need talking to? Does it require attention? Does it need to be fed? Do you rock your father’s lost foot in your arms. Do you sing it a lullaby? Do you tie it to a tree and take your whip to it? Is your father’s lost foot the beginning or the end?

I’ve had nights lately when it came to me that I had never left that shed. That everything up to that point and everything after it happened in there.

Is happening in there.

Is that my beginning or my ending?

I’ll burn this stack of sheets when I’m done.

As it came to pass they did not put the pig sticker that had been in Linus Lancaster’s neck into my own. This had been the subject of debate and considerable discussion in light of Bennett Marsden’s promised return. I know this because they both of them walked into the shed where I lay shackled in my declivity more than once and then walked back out again. Zinnia came always with the pig sticker. On some occasions she was preceded by Cleome and others she was followed by her. One time she walked all the way up to me and turned me over and put the point of it at the nape under my hair. Then she pulled it back up and walked away and left me lying facedown. Cleome was quiet each time. They both only talked when they were walking away. I could not hear what they said. I knew it was Cleome arguing mercy and Zinnia mercy’s opposite. It had always been this way. Cleome soft. Zinnia hard.

Then they left. They took their leave one bright morning in what I later pieced out was early June. I had been sleeping and then I was awake and saw Zinnia standing out by the well. Cleome was some yards ahead, a sack on her back, big as her front. My old traveling hat with its pink ribbon on her head.

Zinnia said, “Peace on you now, Mother Ginny. We’re done.” As she said this she held up a key. I knew what key that was. She held it up then dropped it down into the well.

“You hear a splash?” Cleome called.

Zinnia didn’t answer her. She looked in at me. I thought she nodded. Nodded with her eyes at me. I’d had nor food nor water for three days. There was none left near me. The key to my shackle was dropped down Linus Lancaster’s well. Cleome had moved out of sight into her tomorrow. Still Zinnia stood. She looked in the direction Cleome had gone, then she looked back at me. Her lips were moving. A song came over to me. It was a song we’d sung. All three of us together. Picking daisies on hell’s front porch in the long ago.