Kind One (12 page)

All that last day I looked out through the door. I looked through it all that night, and the night was rich in moon and I could see the well. I’ll come swimming down you, I thought. I will swim the wide dark ways of the earth. I will dive down and swim out into your corridors of water and stone. I will shiver my soul through your rooms draped in midnight fruit and flower and deliver myself dripping unto the fire and take my place at Linus Lancaster’s side. I will stand beside him as that wet sizzles off me, and if they sing in hell I will stand next to my husband and sing, and maybe in hell where they have different ways my small voice will drown his big voice out.

I will do this, I thought. They have thrown my death down into the well and I will follow it. I followed it. The gibbous moon draped itself down over my world, lit my way. There was no splash when I hit water.

It was good into the forenoon of that last morning when I saw what I had not seen all that day and night for following my death: a piece of purple thread strung taut from the beam behind me and out through the motes aswirl in the shed light to the lip of the well and over into that hole. I knew I was dreaming it, but my hand went out and took it and pulled and, dreaming, hauled it hand over hand until the key had come out of its wet and its dark. I dreamed it came down on the yard dirt with a thump of dust and that I pulled it through the shed dirt and into my hand. My dream played dreaming tricks with me and at first wouldn’t let the key into the lock of my shackle. My eyes looked at my hands and my hands at the lock and the key would not enter and after it had entered would not turn. Then it did. I dreamed my way up out of my filth and my shed and walked bloody-ankled to the edge of the well and saw the dream of my face down below amid the dark water. Zinnia or Cleome or both had drunk of that water before they departed and they had left the bucket half-filled on the far side where I had not seen it from the shed. I woke from my dream with that bucket at my lips. I woke and ran.

I SLEPT EASY
in that cold frame I came to rest in behind Lucious Wilson’s outhouse easier than I slept in any bed before or after, in company or alone. The dirt to it was soft, and as I lay there the nights I did I sunk enough to put me back into my hole in that shed in Kentucky. I dug out that hole with my fingers. They had gotten me used to putting myself down into the dirt during the daytime, and when they put me away at night I got to favoring the idea of a shallow hole to make my bed in. All those weeks and months previous, in Evansville and Indianapolis, I had been thinking about that hole. About where I had been dead and waiting for the pig sticker to put the final word to it. I found it again in that cold frame behind the outhouse.

Before she passed I told the old woman who found me and took me to Lucious Wilson about that. About that and about my husband’s piece of paradise and about my breakfasts with him. I told her about the pigs running wild and my hugging the oak tree and the shackle and watching Alcofibras at his turn. That old woman liked to sip fresh mint tea to settle her before sleeping, and as I talked she sat there and sipped it. Every now and again she would pick a mint leaf off her tongue. I told her about taking the strop to Zinnia and about taking the strop to Cleome. I told her I had not raised my voice against my husband when he was at Alcofibras. I told her I had tempted Linus Lancaster into taking me down to Kentucky to live in his fine house with him. That I had sat in his big lap and tickled his ear with a piece of timothy.

“Well, well, Sue,” she said. “The Lord has his ways and meanings for us all.”

“The water moved away from me. It wouldn’t have me,” I said.

“I know it. I know it.”

She had crop-colored eyes and a nice way of speaking. She died two days later when a horse kicked her in the head.

If it hadn’t, I could have told her that I had not stopped taking the strop to Cleome even after I saw her sick in the mornings nor when Zinnia told me why and begged me to give her Cleome’s and her own lickings both. Or that it was ten days and nights of stroppings and visits down the hall from the time I found that second photographic portrait in my husband’s drawer in the chifforobe, on the back of which had been written, in my husband’s own hand, “dearly departed and my two daughters,” to the night I pulled the pig sticker out of the moon-slathered sow Linus Lancaster had lately slaughtered and hung up by the barn and came up behind him as he sat to a late whiskey, singing with that voice of his, and gristled every speck of it into his neck.

I cannot account for that delay. There was a fury in me. It is there still.

A time as I was coming up north through the twilight, heading for the river with its ferryman, a rider with black teeth leaned down off his horse and asked me what I was running from.

“You’re looking at it,” I said.

I also cannot give a reason why I did not finish the second part of the chore I’d set myself that evening and apply that pig sticker to myself. Or why, having left it sit there in Linus Lancaster, I didn’t pack up my bag and run. I knew it wasn’t kisses I had coming.

You’d have thought I enjoyed that jaunt there in the shed. Was gobbling up my just desserts. Taking what was mine and earned. Giving it a hiss and a grin. Letting my fury out into the young days of Kentucky to turn a step and a bow with theirs.

Once in my deepest early days a boy got lost and fell into a pond, and when they found him he was just a blue coat and red pants floating facedown under ten inches of ice. My father went out with his axe to help get him out. All the men had axes and they made a kind of clock on the ice and took turns letting their axes fall. The axes fell one after the other around the clock, and pieces of ice flew up into the air and off to the sides and caught the sunlight coming down into the crater they were making. I was five. The boy had been my playmate. It looked like they were pulling him out of the eye of a jewel. When they had him out and were wrapping him on the bank, I walked over to the jewel crackling around the black water and just dropped myself in. It was my father who pulled me out. When he had me home and dry and hugged, he whipped me until I saw the same stars I’d seen around that jewel in the pond, and then he whipped me some more because when he asked me if I’d had enough licking, I started to smile.

Comes a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out, “Right this way.”

Well, here I come.

I WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
in 1861. What I walked away from one late spring morning in Kentucky I vowed never to walk toward again. The long years went by and I kept my vow. Then this notion came upon me. It put a hand on my shoulder as I sat to my Sunday prayer. It put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

I carried it here. All the days and nights it took to make the journey. When I was eighteen and my sister was sixteen and we walked away together. Held hands and walked, the two of us, away across the stone bridge. There was a Klaxon as that hand squeezed my shoulder.

It must have been just outside the church. I started and sat up straight, caught Eunice Fairbanks’s eye and we both gave a laugh. That laugh covered up the feeling of that other thing well enough that it wasn’t until I was on my way out of the church that I thought of it again. The Reverend Washington was standing out on the street shaking hands, sending off his blessings. I told Prosper, my nephew, to wait and asked the Reverend if I could have a moment. We stood away from the traffic, leaned in close to each other against the noise. I told him it was the old days come to visit. He asked me if they wanted anything in particular. I told him that they did, that I had felt a call.

“Stay here with us, Granny,” he said. “You fought all the fight of this world. Stay right here. Let others fight now. Take your rest.”

The Reverend Washington is a fine young man. He tends to the poor and holds the hands of the sick. Once I saw him lift a car off a little white boy who had been thrown under it. They give trouble to some of the colored churches but not to ours. Prosper has been right to seek his counsel a number of times. I thanked him. He was born long after the old days. I asked him if he would pray a moment with me.

I went when Cleome had fallen deep into her sleep in the corner we had taken for ourselves in the barn. I saw one of the old sows, easing an itch on the oak tree, as I made my way and held my hand up to my head against the bats swooping all around. The candle I had brought did nothing in the bright moonlight. When I reached the shed, I set it on a ledge then went and looked at her. I could see fresh blood, black in the candlelight, seeping around her ankle where the iron cut. She was asleep.

I worked quietly, hooking the far end of the thread to the same bracket that held her chain, weaving the line up over two of the shiny roof beams. Then I took it over the nail stopper in the door and out into the moonlight. The sow was done and had flopped down into a pile by the tree. There were others of her kind around, you could hear them snoring off in the dark. I don’t know when they had stopped fearing bears and wolves, maybe they had all gotten too big to care about things with teeth, and certainly we never troubled them anymore. I took the thread three strong loops around the key as I stood next to the well and left it sitting on the edge. Then I walked my way backward all the way to the bracket, pulling on the line as I went to make sure it was strong. She stirred as I walked by so I had to kick her, make her think I was there for other reasons. It wasn’t hard to pretend. It was not pretend. She barely gave a murmur, though I had kicked her in the neck. I took my candle down off the ledge.

“I’ll see you again in the morning, Mother Ginny,” I said.

Cleome was sitting up when I got back.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

I nodded. I had her lie back down on the hay and I rubbed her legs. Presently, she was giving out her soft little snores. Sunlight came to wake us all soon enough.

I knew just where it was. After my talk with the Reverend Washington outside of the church, I went and stood in front of the drawer I’d set it in years before. Hidden behind a hairbrush and a pincushion. A bundle of needles. A square of orange cloth.

I am old but I am not yet tired, and I have gotten to live on all these years with Prosper in this place, I thought. I have risen from deep waters and I have kept on, I thought. Fifty years have gone by. I have my vow, I have my life, I thought.

I packed my travel bag, put on my travel hat, and walked out the door. Prosper caught up with me when I got to Michigan Avenue, said to find me he had just followed the trail of everyone I’d walked by like I was some kind of a ghost. I told Prosper that people could think what they wanted and that ghost or not, I was bound on business for Kentucky. Prosper looked at me, saw I meant it, took my bag, and said that if Kentucky was
our
destination we had best take the train. I asked him about his work at the stone yard. He said his work could wait: he had seen the look in my eye.

The train took us all of a rattle down to Louisville, Louisville of my first dreams. I did not shudder when we stepped off the platform. I did not shudder when our search for a wagon took us near where I had lived as a small girl. For years when the bad part of the past times have come to me, I have nodded my head, set my jaw, and looked them in the eye until they have left again. I did no different now that I had come to them. The wagon Prosper rented for us had a pallet in the back where I could recline. Part of the time as we rolled toward Charlotte County I lay on my back with my head on my traveling bag and looked up at the sky. Every now and then I would lift up and call out some direction to Prosper, but otherwise I just lay there. I was on my back, like a dead thing, when we rolled over the stone bridge.

“We’re here now, Aunt Zinnia, wherever that here is,” Prosper said.

“Paradise,” I said, sitting up, preparing to crack the yolk of my eyes over that world once more. “Paradise is what we called it.”

The barn and house and oak tree were gone. But the well was still there. And the shed. I climbed into the front of the wagon and Prosper went to knock on the door of the house that stood now where the barn had been. I kept my eyes on the well. There was no door on the front of the shed. A couple came out of the house with Prosper, like us but darker-skinned.

“How do?” said the man.

“You will have to forgive me,” I said as they came over. “Now that I am here I see that I will not be able to get down.”

“Aunt Z?” said Prosper.

“You want some cool tea, honey?” said the woman.

But I did not answer them; how could I answer them? For there I was again, standing over what lay shackled unto its misery in that shed. And there I sat, myself, with the shackle on my arm and a rat at my foot. And there leaned Cleome, her back wet from fresh whipping, the rain dripping onto her head through the holes in the roof. And there stood Alcofibras, the chain wrapped around his neck, refusing to sit even though he was kept there for two days. That shed where I had kicked and been kicked. I sat on the wagon and I sat inside of that shed but never moved. The thing at my feet moved. I kicked it. We’ll speak on this someday, I thought.