Kind One (15 page)

“I made us run,” I said. “I got us lost.”

The little house Lucious Wilson had given to Ginny Lancaster sat one mile away from his big one at the end of a stand of shagbark hickory and giant white oak. There was a fine field behind it and a few brave flowers poking up out of a black bed on the front lawn. This time I had Prosper get out of the wagon with me and come to the front door. I stood there looking at its fresh yellow paint for a long time without knocking then took the spool with its few last lengths of purple thread out of my bag and set it down on the porch. It didn’t look like much. Any kind of a wind would have blown it out into the field.

“All right,” I said.

“All right, Aunt Zinnia,” said Prosper.

We were almost to the cart when the door behind us opened.

I could not see her at first, there in the gloom.

All those years, all those miles.

“Please,” she said. “Come back. Come in.”

A woman gave me a blanket for the child, said he looked strong, asked me if I planned to keep him.

“Keep him?” I said. “He is my nephew. He is my own.”

They put oar to water at dusktime, took us out across the darkening waters. The child cried but a little as we went toward the lights on the far bank. I named him when we were halfway home.

I HAVE TWO VOICES.
One I use when I am at home and one I use when I am anywhere else. I sat down in the booth and used the second one. The waitress brought me a cup of coffee. When she set it down in front of me, I used the voice again and asked for a slice of pie.

“You want whipped cream with that, hon?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

She brought me a glass of ice water with the pie. There was a fan turning noisily on the ceiling. She had sweated the armpits out of her uniform. She looked tired. Too worn out for the job. Her uniform too snug.

“Come far?” she asked me.

“Illinois,” I said.

“All that way?”

I nodded.

“First time?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve been down here before. Came on a visit with my aunt. It has been awhile though.”

I had spent the morning on the Ohio in a rented boat I had barely been able to steer. Twice I had run aground on sandbars. I am too old to pole heavy boats off sandbars, but I had done it each time. Aunt Z told me, before she died, that if I ever went looking, I should keep an eye out for a lone, brown bluff on the far side of the water. I had seen it long after I had lost hope.

“There’s a house down by the river. A big white house with a green roof. How do I get there?” I asked the waitress when she came over with the coffeepot.

“Why do you want to go
there
?” the waitress said.

“It’s where I’m bound,” I said.

She looked at me, raised her eyebrow. I counted three fat droplets of sweat hanging from its curling tines. One of them dropped as I watched. She wiped the others away. I knew she couldn’t tell, hadn’t seen it yet, but it was in the room with us now, was ambling along the line of booths toward us, would come and sit down beside me, would curl my straight hair and darken my light skin. When I was young I had my smile and my fresh, unlined young face to send it away when I had to, but those days are long gone. Still, I had my traveling voice, my Main Street voice.

“This pie is delicious,” I said.

“I baked it myself,” she said.

“I might have guessed. I might just have guessed.”

I ate my pie, drank my coffee, got my directions. I was waving good-bye when I stepped out the front door and only narrowly avoided colliding with a man and a woman dressed in old horse blankets and wearing feathers in their hair. They nodded at me and I nodded back, then I watched them cross the street and disappear into a stand of trees beyond a filling station just like they had never been.

The house sat on a rise above the river. I left my tools in the car and walked down a narrow lane from the road. The front door opened before I had crossed the scraggly lawn. A woman in her later years stood before me. She had on a clean blue dress. She looked up at me through heavy spectacles.

“Can I do for you?” she said.

“I am a reporter for the
Chicago Sun
, and I am writing an article on places where slaves were given help. I understand this was one.”

I had spent time memorizing this speech during the drive down. I have never been a reporter for the
Chicago Sun
or for any other paper, but I did once, briefly, before I took up my trade, think of becoming one.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

“I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“We don’t keep with coloreds here.”

“I understand.”

“Who told you about this place? They been talking in town?”

I shook my head. The house was in bad shape but didn’t look old enough to have been standing for better than seventy years. One or two of the outbuildings, possibly.

“Is there someone else I might speak to? Someone who might direct me?”

“I’m it,” she said. “Last one standing.”

“I know how that feels.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be any help to you.”

“And I’m sorry for having troubled your afternoon.”

“You have other places to visit for your newspaper article?”

“Just this one.”

I had turned and started across the lawn. I had begun to walk back to my car, to return from nothing to nothing, the air, the road, the long drive back, when she spoke.

“My parents were Christian people,” she said.

I stopped.

“They said the good Lord saw no color when he looked down at us.”

I had put my hat back on. I took it off again.

“No color at all.”

I nodded. She looked carefully at me.

“You don’t look anything like a reporter,” she said.

I nodded again.

She stood without moving for a long time, then she clicked her tongue and gave me a small, careful smile.

We crossed what had once possibly been a sorghum field, then followed a path down a gulley, through a notch between two hills and into a pretty stand of oak, willow, and birch. I took my hat off and held it against my chest when she pointed. Two or three dozen moss-dripping markers sat surrounded by the remnants of an iron fence. The markers were cross-shaped. Made of pink granite most of them.

“Some didn’t make it across the river. My parents buried every last one.”

I nodded. I’d heard about that.

“Who you looking for?” she said.

“Her name was Cleome.”

“No Cleomes here,” she said.

I was walking the markers, the woman stepping quietly behind me.

“I know every name. If they had one. Josiah, Eunice, Claremont, Osa, Letty, Brister, Dorcas, Jupiter, Pompey, Fanny, Turquoise, Lince.”

I turned. The woman had stopped. Was looking up at me.

“What’s your given name?”

I told her.

“We’ve met before.”

I shook my head, smiled. She did not.

“I used to ride the boat when they made the crossing. My daddy said we were doing Christian work. Told me to come along. You got your name on that boat. Your aunt called it out. We all heard it.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

“They burned my parents out during the war. Said they were helping other people’s property escape. They hung my daddy from a tree.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“My mother rebuilt. She lived to be a hundred.”

I nodded.

“That’s your mother there.”

I followed her arm to a marker at the back of the cemetery. She let me walk over alone. There was moss in the grooves but the inscription could still be read.

Mother of Prosper
1861

“My daddy went out and found her where she passed. Brought her here on the mule wagon. She got her Christian rights as best as they could be given.”

It took me a long time to be able to speak. I used my first voice when I did.

“Then I’m obliged to your father.”

“No,” she said. “No, you aren’t.”

“Then to you.”

“Not to me either.”

She started to walk back the way they had come, called over her shoulder as she was walking: “There’s room for her name on there. I know a stonecutter in town wouldn’t ask any questions.”

But I had already seen where I would make my first cut.

THERE IS A STORY
goes with my name too. I was to have been called Joseph after the grand old man and be done with it. I was to have been Joseph Aloysius Wilson and that’s that. I was fresh born and on the earth and had my name. Then my father had his vision. Out in the field in the middle of the bright sunshine with his eyes still open but for the blinks. In it just born as I was, he carried me on his back all the way to North Carolina where I had started my dark swim. My mother stayed behind in Indiana, and my father carried me away from barley and corn and back into cotton and tobacco. He followed the route they had taken in riding away from it all, and he knew the road every inch and mile. I did not cry on his back, just rode along like a soft doll, and when he was again on the farm they had left behind there was no one but a colored woman waiting there. All the others had gone like my parents had, and it was just an old colored woman he had never laid eyes on before. She was dressed in drab except for a crimson scarf. In her hands she held a package tied with string. My father reached for the package, but she shook her head, so he reached behind him and hefted me around and she put it in my hands. When she had completed this chore, she touched my forehead and nodded at my father and was gone.

“Well, open it,” my father told me, even though I had just been born. I opened it and fetched out a slip of paper had on it a single word.

“Lucious,” my father told my mother when he was awake to the world again and had got back to what wasn’t yet quite a house.

“He will be called Joseph as we planned. As he already is,” said my mother.

“Lucious is his name,” my father said.

“You just fell asleep and had a dream.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“His name is Joseph.”

“Lucious is what he will be called.”

My father said it one more time, and then he took up his musket and fired it out the window. And that was that, and when in after years I complained about my name no one knew how to say or spell, they would both of them tell me about my father’s vision. Didn’t stop me from hating it though. The way a child can hate a thing. Hate it to crying, to kicking, to gnashing of tumbledown milk teeth. You will understand why when one Sunday we passed a farm where a colored woman, first I had ever seen, was bent over in an oat field, I wrote my hated name down on a piece of paper and wrapped it up in a package and tied it with string. I waited until my parents weren’t likely to look for me and walked four miles back to that farm and handed it to the colored woman, who took it from me without a word.

“My name is Joseph. I don’t want your name,” I told her. She had green eyes and fine, long eyebrows and wore feathers and strips of string in her hair and was the strangest and handsomest woman I had ever seen.

“I gave it back,” I told my father that evening at supper.

“Gave back what?” my father said.

“My name.”

“To that red Indian girl?”

“Was she an Indian?”

That is the first part of the story of my name, and I have told it twice in my life to listeners hadn’t heard it before. The first time was during the war, when I was sick in love and there was a hurt soldier resting up in the little house I still have here on my property. He had been home to see his parents and was returning to the fight and had had a wound go bad on him. I was sick in love, and the one I was sick in love with was tending his wound and looking soft at him who was curly-haired and green-eyed and not at me who was just an already-old man owned some beasts and land, and when I went down there it was to try and see what it was that soldier had that I didn’t. Took about ten seconds to see that he had everything. Everything I was missing. Going back down to war. Probably to get killed. Thunder and glory. Sulfur and bayonet. Clear road to the beyond.

He was young and sick and asked me to hold his hand, grip it tight. I held his hand and told him the story of my name. He had his fever and didn’t hear it. I know because when the fever broke a week later, I asked him if he remembered what my name was supposed to have been, should have been, and when I smiled and asked this, he looked at me strange. So I bade him farewell and sent him down to rejoin his regiment on one of my good mules. As he rode off, the one I was sick in love with and who wasn’t sick or any other ways in love with me whispered out at him, “Good-bye, Joseph.”

She was the other I told the story to. I told it to her not a season ago. In that same little house, which for the fifty years after that soldier’s leaving I saw to it was her house. Of course it is now no longer her house because she is also gone. Vanished up the chimney with its ash.