Chaneysville Incident (60 page)

“John,” she said.

I looked up and saw that she had paced off six feet from the first stone, but in the direction opposite the one I had taken. And she had found a stone. “Go—”

“I know,” she said. She went on beyond, found nothing, came back and paced down the slope. Eight feet down the slope she found a stone. She paced on, found two more in the file, spaced five feet apart. That seemed to be the end of them.

“What
is
this?” she said.

“Another graveyard,” I said. “Another graveyard right beside the other one.”

“But why would they put some of the family over here?”

“Maybe it wasn’t some of the family. Maybe it was something that belonged to the family.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” I said. “They came from Virginia to pioneer, but they brought a little help with them…” but then I realized that didn’t make any sense. “No,” I said. “Not help. They must have decided to go into the breeding business. It’s hard to tell how they did. This woman here had three children that died; there’s no way to tell how many got old enough to sell. This one, well, either all her children lived, or she was a lousy breeder. The other two, probably so-so. You wanted to know about the County; well, here it is. How do you like it? Think I’ve been cheating you out of anything worth mentioning?”

“Men,” she said.

“What?”

“If they were breeding, what about studs?”

“Oh, that’s no problem; they’re probably over there on the other side of the wall. I mean, why pay good money for a nigger and give him a harem when you can do the work yourself. Anything else you want to know?”

And I was hoping there was. Because just for a minute I wanted to tell it all to her, tell her all about how Richard Iiames had come with Joseph Powell, grandson of Thomas, brother of John, captain of the
Seafoam
; for a minute I wanted to watch her face when I told her that. But she didn’t say anything. She just went kicking across the slope, her feet throwing up frenzied clouds of snow. I didn’t say anything, feeling the anger going out of me as she kicked, knowing what she was feeling, what it was like to go that way, searching, not knowing how, or for what. And I knew what it would be like for her when she failed to find anything at all.

But she didn’t. She didn’t fail. Somewhere down the slope, in line with the two stones in the last file, she found another one. I heard her suck her breath in when her foot hit it, but she did not cry out; she just sucked her breath in and stood, panting, looking down. And then she looked up at me. She glared at me, angrily. Then she came back up the slope, stood beside me.

“What about that marker down there?” she said.

“Probably a man,” I said. I looked down over the valley, watched as the wind kicked up more snow, and braced myself for the blast that would come in a minute when the cold gust reached us. But as I shivered, the number of them came to me: one man, four women, seven children; twelve.

“I was wrong,” I said. “They weren’t breeding stock.”

She looked at me. “What were they doing here, then?”

“Dying,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We were halfway up the slope when she caught her foot and stumbled. As I helped her up I saw that she had stumbled on another marker. It was like the others, the same size and shape, and it had nothing written on it, but it was not in the pattern at all, it was above it, closer to the southeast corner of the Iiames family plot, almost exactly where he would have been when he killed himself.

“Somebody marked his death,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, and went on, not wanting to tell her it wasn’t a death that somebody had marked, it was only a grave.

T
HE STORM WAS IN ITS FINAL PHASE.
The south wind had gone, had taken with it the moisture and the clouds. Now the sky was clear and black, the air crisp and dry and cold as steel. Now the west wind blew. I knew it was the west wind—I could hear it singing.

That was what I had called it when I was a child; that was what it had sounded like to me. And that was what I had believed it was, even though nobody else thought it sounded like singing, not even Old Jack. He had claimed it was the souls of the Indians who lived and died in the mountains, long before the white man came, panting as they ran in pursuit of deer and bear and catamount in their hunting grounds beyond the grave. But he had never argued with my interpretation. Because it was not the kind of thing you could argue about. He heard panting, I heard singing; we both heard something, and believed what we wanted to believe.

Eventually there had come a time when I had not needed legends to explain it. I had been in my last year of high school then, studying physics, and I read in my textbook how the passage of a gas over an irregular surface sets up vibrations, the frequency of which varies in direct proportion to something, and in inverse proportion to something else, and I had realized that the sound I called the singing of the wind was not singing at all, or panting, either; that it was just a sound, like a car honking; that if you knew the shape of the land and the velocity and temperature and direction of the wind, you could sit there with your slide rule and come up with a pretty good idea of what the pitch would be. It was something that you didn’t have to believe in; it was something you could know. And so I had copied down the equations in my notebook and I had waited anxiously for the first of the winter storms, and when the snow had fallen and the sky was clearing, I had gone to the far side to sit with Old Jack and drink toddies and listen to the sound the wind made and to glory in the power of
knowing
what it was. I had told him what I had learned and he had looked at me blankly, and shaken his head and said he didn’t give a damn about what the book said; it was the souls of Indians. And I had realized for the first time that even though I loved him, he was an ignorant old man, no better than the savages who thought that thunder was the sound of some god’s anger, and for the first time, I had argued with him about it. But then it had started, and I had left off arguing to listen. And what I had heard had filled me with cold fear. For I had not heard a sound like a car honking; I had not heard vibrations of a frequency that varied directly or inversely with anything at all; I had heard singing. I had sat there, clutching my toddy, trying to perceive that sound as I had known I should, trying not to hear voices in it, trying not to hear words. But I had heard them anyway.

In the days that followed I had spent every spare minute studying the physics of sound, studying harder than I had when I had needed to pass an exam. But it made no difference. For when the west wind blew, I heard it singing. And so I had done what I had to do; I had gone away from the mountains, down to the flat land, where there were no irregularities of surface. And I had promised myself I would never hear it again, that I would never go up into the mountains again. I had kept that promise, until now. Only now I knew where the lie had been: I had stopped hearing, but I had not stopped listening.

It was cold in the cabin; I could not recall its ever being as cold there—or anywhere—before. It was the wind that made it cold, not only stabbing through every crack in the walls but slicing over the top of the chimney, creating a fearsome draft, making the fire burn strongly but without heat, making it give off nothing but a hard, cold, fierce, unholy light.

I saw Judith leave the stove—not Judith, really, just the shadow of her, moving against the glow of the stove. She set a steaming cup on the table before me. I did not need to taste it, or even smell it, to know what it was: coffee. I did not want coffee. I wanted a toddy. I needed one. But I could not expect Judith to understand that. There was a lot that I needed that she would never understand. For she was a woman and she was white, and though I loved her there were points of reference that we did not share. And never would.

We had come back easily, more easily than I would have thought possible. We had to struggle down from the hillside and out to the main road, but when we got there we found that it had been plowed and cindered, and within half a mile of walking we were offered a ride in a battered red GMC pickup by an aging farmer with a ruddy, weather-beaten face. He said little to us, only asking if we wanted a ride and how far we were going, and sharing his opinion on the timing of the inevitable shift in the wind. He dropped us at the base of the mountain, and we had made our way up. The sun was high then, and shining on that slope, and the air was cold but still; we made the climb in half an hour, and brought the car down in just a little more, slowed only by an occasional deep drift and the fact that we were going in reverse.

I bought gas in Rainsburg, and we made good time from there. I stayed in the valley, coming north through Charlesville and Beegletown, swinging west at the Narrows, tooling slowly through the Town. I expected to have to climb the Hill on foot since it was rarely—if ever—plowed, but when we got there I saw the Town’s road-grader coming down; Randall Scott was an honest politician—he stayed scared.

The cabin was cold, but not as cold as I had feared it would be; there were still coals glowing in the grate. I built a tinder fire on top of them to force a draft. In half an hour the heat was coming up well, and the frost no longer blossomed before our faces. By then I had made tea, and we drank it loaded with sugar, and I heated stew and fried venison steaks, and we wolfed them down. Then I loaded the stove with wood to burn while we slept. By the time I finished, Judith was already lying down, huddled under the blankets. But she wasn’t sleeping—her breathing was too regular for that. I mixed myself a toddy and stood by the stove. When I had drunk it all I went to lie beside her; she moved quickly to make room. Then we lay there, listening to the fire roaring in the chimney.

“John?” she said after a while.

“What?”

“Are you going to tell me
anything
?”

“I’m not sure I can,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“Tell me what you want to know,” I said.

“I want to know who the hell is buried down there,” she said.

“Oh. That. Slaves are buried down there. Runaway slaves. A subject of a local legend; not much of one. No heroes doing great deeds. Nobody much has even bothered to write it down, except for one local historian, and we know about local historians….”

“John.”

“A group of slaves came north on the Underground Railroad. They got across the Line all right, into what they probably thought was free territory. Only there wasn’t any such thing. And so they were about to be captured and taken back. But they decided they’d rather die. Some kind soul in the South County did it for them. Anyway, that’s the legend.”

“And you think those are the people buried down there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you think it has something to do with your…with Moses Washington.”

“Sure,” I said. “You know, it’s really amazing when you think about it. I mean, mathematically it’s perfectly possible, but for a man to take a mathematical possibility and turn it into reality…it’s amazing. I don’t know whether you’d call it obsession or dedication, but it surely is amazing.”

“John,” she said. “Will you please slow down and talk to me?
What
is amazing?”

“Moses Washington’s search. He started it when he was sixteen years old. He dedicated his life to it. That’s easy to say, but you can’t understand it until you sit down and figure out how he must have found those graves. He wouldn’t have known they were there, or even what he was looking for. And so he would have had to look everywhere for something. And he would have known, before he was twenty years old, that he was going to have to do it that way and he would have had to accept, at twenty, the possibility that he was going to end up looking at every square yard of this County, on foot. And he would have had to accept the fact, at twenty, that he wasn’t going to be finished until he was…I don’t know. The odds would make it at least forty-five. And so he would have had to set up a plan, a pattern, that he was going to follow for a quarter of a century, longer than he’d been alive. It was perfectly possible; there’s about a thousand square miles of County, and he could have eliminated some of it—plowed fields, rivers, towns, so forth—but even if there were a thousand square miles, he could have searched a square mile a week, which isn’t much. But it would take twenty-five years. And it took longer. It took him thirty-five years, even though he naturally prowled the County most of the time. So by then he must have actually searched most of the County. Maybe all of it; maybe he missed them the first time, not knowing what he was looking for—”

“Missed the graves,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But how did he know that that was what he was looking for? When he found it, I mean. And how was it—”

“He knew because there were only twelve runaway slaves. That’s what the legend says. Well, it says a dozen, which could be taken as an approximation, but could be dead accurate. And he knew the legend; it was one of his favorites.”

“But there are thirteen graves,” she said.

“That’s how he knew he’d found him.”

“Found who? You mean…C.K.?”

“Yes,” I said. “C.K.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Thirty-five years,” I said.

“Why thirty-five?” she said. “He died in 1958, right?”

“He found them in 1942,” I said. “He would have found them in the fall or early winter, because the ground would have had to be clear. Or maybe he found them in the spring or summer and took the time deciding what to do.”

“What did he do?”

“He joined the army,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“You know,” I said, “it’s funny. You spend years fiddling around with facts, trying to put them in the right places, trying to explain them with each other, and maybe you come pretty close, and everything fits except maybe one or two things, and that’s usually because you’ve made a mistake right from the very beginning, overlooked something so obvious that when it finally dawns on you you just want to cry. I spent the better part of fifteen years wondering what happened to him in the army that made him change. I guess it seemed reasonable to assume that was where it had happened; everybody knows war changes men—that’s why they keep having them. But the war didn’t change Moses Washington. He would have had to change before he would go to war. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. Moses Washington, fifty-two years old, volunteers, hell,
bribes
his way into a white man’s army, a segregated army, to fight a white man’s war; he would have had to change in order to do that, or have had a pretty strong reason.”