The Wedding (14 page)

Preacher had a penny bun in his pocket. He threw it to the squirrel, and that old fool didn’t even run with it. He sat
back on his haunches like a natural man and held that bread between his paws like he had human hands. An old dry bun couldn’t grease his insides like the meat and the oil in a handful of nuts, but it was better than another inch of dying. Preacher went without bread that day. Without that bread that squirrel might not have lived to that day’s end, and Preacher knew that he would live to buy a penny bun another day. He had been taught that bread unshared is bread unblessed when someone else is hungry, whether man or beast, friend or stranger. In God’s eye a penny bun can match a boar and a sow and a milk cow for magnitude in giving.

The butternut woman kept a few chickens, as did every woman with any pride. Chickens were easy to care for, easy to kill. A woman without a few laying hens could never make a cake to melt in the mouth, or rush out and wring a chicken’s neck for a Sunday caller. But a pig was what a man provided, if he was worth his salt. A pig put meat on the table every single day, not just on Sunday to show off for company. Wasn’t any part of a pig except his grunt that wasn’t good fixin’, from hogshead cheese to pickled pig’s feet, from hams and shoulders and spareribs and loins to fatback, crackling, and lard chitterlings.

Preacher plain made up his mind that he wasn’t going to turn away without taking the worry out of winter for as many years as mammy pigs and pappy pigs made mammy and pappy baby pigs. So he spoke for the boar and the sow and the mule and the milk cow like he didn’t know any better than to think that this old cracker was the Great White Father who never said no to a deserving darky, sinc
ebeing white had blessed him with more than he could use. Before Preacher could offer his iron back as bond he had to stand patient while this peckerwood used up a whole month’s cussing to ask if Preacher was a crazy nigger who thought he was talking to a crazy white man who pulled the hairs off his ass for any nigger crazy enough to ask.

“Nassuh, Cap’n, I never seen no crazy white gen’men,” Preacher said. “Dere couldn’t be no crazy white gen’men, or dey wouldn’t know enough to be borned white. I never seen a colored man had that much sense. All them I know was borned in colored skin. White folks is thinking while colored folks is sleeping. Nassuh, I’m talking to a sharp-thinking gen’man that knows a bargain from a bag of wind. I’m a gospel man, Cap’n, living decent with a seemly woman and raising a son to stay out of jail. I want something you got in plenty, Cap’n, I want it most bad. And I got a willing back and a willing way to give in return.”

Ole peckerwood studied it out in his mind. Now, that mule might kick someone to death someday, and better that mule kill a nigger than a white man, and he studied some more how he had more pigs stirring up the cow dung for corn than there was corn in the cow dung for them to stir up, and he wasn’t fixing to build a separate pew for them runtiest ones who just stood back and let the bigger ones hog all the swill in the trough. Them scrawny two there might be a tolerable trade for the heft in a nigger’s hide.

As for the milk cow, there was that skittery one that made the rest of the herd run wild any time anybody let out a holler, and just as worse, she had to be milked like her tits were glass, which took more patience than a little bit. But
dumb or not, she gave good milk when she didn’t kick the pail over, which made her worth equal to the help he needed to put up the house for his married daughter that had to be built before another brat was born to plague his nights with its bawling. The minute that house was hammered together as far back as his farthest land, he’d set this nigger to digging him a round cellar to keep his vittles out of stealing reach of his son-in-law, who lived to eat and make wet-bottomed babies.

Building that house and digging that cellar wasn’t all that Preacher was put to do. Most of it was mule-hard, and none of it was easy. He earned those animals three times over. But he learned from the peckerwood: he learned a dozen different ways of working with his hands, and he learned how to be a self-reliant man, and that knowledge was worth whatever he paid for it in time and bone tiredness.

On the way to the peckerwood’s place Preacher had to pass several deserted farms, wildly aslant on their crumbling foundations. With their broken windows and smashed doors, they were wide open to the annual assault of the equinox winds. At first they were only eyesores to Preacher. Time and tempest would lay them level. But as Preacher learned how to put a house together he began to see these sagging structures as so many lengths of lumber, most of them rotted, but some of them still solid enough for reuse.

Making deliberately brief excursions before and after his working hours (not wanting to knock at a white door too early or show a colored face at a screaming door after dark), Preacher tried to trace the abandoned farms to their owners.
The bits and pieces of information he slowly accumulated finally led him to the bank, to which most of the land had reverted. Standing respectful before the bank president and seeing by the style of his face and his fine-boned hands that this was a blue-blood buckra, raised with grace and easier to make a plea to than a hard-nosed peckerwood, Preacher asked for Mr. President’s permission to finish pulling down the shacks that were near enough to falling down to hurt some heedless child who strayed too close. He’d sort the wood and use the best. The rest he’d tote away, and then he’d sweep that spot so clean there wouldn’t be one rusty nail for a barefoot child to die from.

When Mr. President asked him how he was going to tote that trash away, he had the answer. There was an old wagon on one of those farms, and some fixing might fix it enough to make it hold together for a spell. Only drawback was that he didn’t know where he would get a horse to hitch it to. Wasn’t one colored soul he knew who had one to lend him. Would be one sorry world for colored folks if there weren’t good white folks to lend a hand when there was nowhere else to turn. If Mr. President knew some gen’men who would trust him with a pulling horse, wasn’t nothing he wouldn’t be glad to do in return.

Mr. President gave Preacher a pondering look, like he was trying to make up his mind if Preacher was starch or sugar water. After a while, he spoke. “There is a horse that is only used occasionally. You could use him any other time, provided you were willing to drive him those special times.”

Preacher told him that he’d never heard of a better bargain, and he didn’t bat an eye when Mr. President said that
he and that horse would be driving the dead. He needed that horse more than he needed to be afraid of a dead white man through with hating, who couldn’t hurt a colored man nearly as much as a live one could, one still raising hell.

Preacher came to find out that Mr. President owned the funeral establishment, the livery stable, the sawmill, and a laundry list of other things besides, which he was holding in trust for the town until such time as other men raised their level of hope and came to buy him out—if not with cash, at least with the confidence that the South could survive.

Preacher was determined to free the Coleses now and forever from the animal terms of “struggle or die,” so that his son and those who came after him would eat without wolfish hunger and learn to reach for more than meat and bread. Looking back, he would reflect that driving the dead was the easiest work he did in that winter of dogged accomplishment. It was a kind of oasis after a hard-working day. The long ride behind the plodding horse to some outlying spot was rest time for him, a time to reflect and let some of his tiredness drain off. Even when he fell asleep and had to backtrack a mile or so, the dead man was still waiting. All Preacher had to do was wrap him up in a winding sheet, hoist him like a sack of meal, and haul him off to be measured for a coffin. It wasn’t steady work, but it did pay; the undertaker, happy to be saved this onerous task, was only too glad to put the pieces of change in Preacher’s pocket.

Preacher already knew all about living poor; now he learned first hand what it was to die poor. The poor didn’t die in houses with stately doorways. They built their doors without regard to the grim detail of dying—grubbing a living
was grimness enough. Nor was there space to spare for a parlor, or any fitting room for a laying out. With the door too narrow to squeeze a coffin through and the two-room house hardly big enough to eat and sleep in, let alone hold a wake in, the poor dead cracker was carted to the coffin shop. There the undertaker kept him cooling until his widow could borrow enough to buy him some burying clothes. When the worn-out man was washed and dressed and anointed, looking better dead and at peace than he had ever looked alive and worried about how to feed all his children, the undertaker placed him in a box. He put the box in a hearse behind a horse with a purple plume, and he drove him to the home of some willing kin with a door that would let a coffin in, and a parlor to set it down in, and chairs for the crying.

Preacher never got to see the crying part of it, or the church, or the cemetery, or the scattering of flowers. But even if he had, he would have preferred his part, the quiet part, just himself and a dead stranger riding down the road together, neither one burdening the other with foolish talk. The only sound in the carriage was Preacher’s sweet voice singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” not loud to a living sinner but soft to a newborn soul going home to heaven.

By the time of spring planting, Preacher had earned all of his farm animals, and his shelters had been stoutly built. Nothing remained but to bring his band to the land of promised plenty. The foul-minded mule was the first challenge. He talked to that mule with a mouth of molten gold, and he walked toward that sitting-down mule with his hand cupped
with kindness, and he looked at that mule like a loving brother, and he led that risen-up mule to the waiting plow and the ready earth. When he came back for the milk cow she took to the rope without tugging. Fear at this journey to the unknown rippled her hide, though, and she lowed with a heavy heart. Preacher began to sing to her long-meter, like a sobbing harp.

With soft hypnotic sounds he sang that slave lament until the lonesome bleating wore away and the trembling subsided under his stroking hand. When it came time to fetch the hogs, Preacher couldn’t tote them in his bosom like a lamb, so he found two hickory poles and turned those poles into a movable pen. He kept the hogs in the V of those poles with the fancy footwork of a dancing master.

Then it was done. Preacher surveyed what his winter had brought forth, and it was good. With a mule to help him plow, his planting land doubled in size and yield. The banker gave Preacher the horse; it was the least he could do. Preacher in turn could do no less than his bound duty whenever death’s right to dignity was rebuffed by a narrow door. The body wagon stood ready for hitching at the back of the barn, and a bright homemade cart went to market with Preacher every morning, piled high with produce. The unhurried
horse with its garlanded hat pulled it along and Preacher walked in back, singing his wares to whatever head popped out of a window at his passing. At the market, his stall was always surrounded by satisfied customers.

At breeding time, his sow produced a fine litter of plump pigs, which she neither trampled nor ate, but suckled like a proud mother until they were old enough to fatten themselves for a shorter life than their happy greed expected. Come fall slaughtering in another year there would be enough meat to store, and cuts of ham, shoulders, and lean-striped bacon for those to whom pork had never been more than a piece of fatback putting some kind of palatable taste in a pot of rice and beans or a mess of greens.

Maybe next year he would get another milk cow. God would open the way. With a mule and a horse and a wagon for hauling, he could hire himself out to whoever needed the linked strength they and he could supply. A dollar picked up here and there between preaching and planting could bulge a saving sock into the size of a cow. Then there would be milk for those infants whose mothers’ breasts sagged with sickness, and for those weaned babies leaving their mother’s lap whose legs should grow straight instead of bowed, and for the ailing and the old, to add to the sugar water that flavored a toothless mouth.

Preacher drew satisfaction from healing, and he often dreamed that his son would be filled with the gift of healing too. Preacher would rather die than see a son of his content with what he had, though. His son would heal, not with the laying on of hands (a gift no mortal man should make claim to), not with senseless words mumbled over some ancestral
devil’s brew, but with knowledge learned from learning places, schools, and books, and men, true doctor men. Just as Melisse—owning a restaurant but not content for her son to be happy staying in the kitchen—pushed and pulled Hannibal into the shape of her ambitions, so did Preacher dream of the day when a son of his would exceed his wildest expectations. With a church that made his title proper in the mouths of his flock
and
in the mouths of white men on Sunday, with a stall that made money, and a wife who earned money, and a house kept so clean that you could eat off the floor, Preacher could have felt that his son would do well if he did no worse. But instead Preacher began to save, what he could when he could, against that day when he would free his son from the stumbling block of illiteracy that made most colored tongues mute.

A preacher’s son must set an example. He must walk a long road to show the fruits of his father’s God-given blessing.

P
reacher’s wife bore him the son that he longed for, and they named him Isaac. He was a beautiful baby, bright and alert, and his development was remarkable. If some cosmic eye had been comparing Preacher’s progress with that of Melisse, it might have given the advantage to the former. Isaac began walking at eleven months, unsteadily but determinedly, and he began to talk shortly thereafter, increasing his small vocabulary daily.