Free Men (15 page)

“I am not a surgeon,” I said.

“And when you leave, what will you do? Hold the ill and whisper to them?”

“I will not be a surgeon,” I said.

He laid the needle on the man’s chest, heaving slow, and dug his fingers in his beard. “And what will you do?”

“Whatever makes a living,” I said.

“Am I not a wealthy man?” He left the needle on the chest and walked to the door.

“I know nothing,” I said. “I am not your son.”

“I do not want a son,” he said, and left.

I looked at the man, whose hand I still held, whose head was turning paler. I shaved where Sterrett had cut, stitched his scalp to itself. I washed the wound in water and whiskey. The pepper smell recalled my father. This man was living still. I crossed his hands upon his chest, removed his shoes. Washed the tools and mopped the blood. Set a candle burning for the odors. Sat with him until he woke. In the silence, I thought of the living I had said I’d make. It was arms holding me, and nothing more.

Sterrett came back after dark, after the man with a hole in his head had risen and gone, after I sat moonlit with my peas, watching the shoots tremble. He ate some corn cake from breakfast and slept. I stole my box from beneath my bed. Took the cake’s remainder and a knife from the surgery. I had seen him cut bone with it. These wrapped in a sack, I heaved myself through the kitchen window. I could have used the door but wanted to leave another way. Three miles past town I found a hollow. The darkness settled on me. I clutched a rambling root and let myself fall away.

IN THE MORNING
I climbed a cart and rode north and east. The man said he wouldn’t mind the company. I spoke in bits at first, for payment, but then was silent. I seemed to lose something each time my mouth opened. Saw bits of myself floating off. He took me through sun and night and brought me to Dorchester near the city. So I came close by the cities, to Savannah and now Charleston, but never saw them. When I was sturdier I would go, when I was not so afraid of men. He asked where I was bound, and I pointed, a little farther. But then I saw a church in a field, a house and a tower and a cross, and the field was gold and purpled with flower, and the sun was enough
to touch, and so I spoke, and when the cart stopped I fell to the ground again. The church was small and brick and bare, and if anything made by man would not hurt me, that was it. I thanked the driver and said I was a servant of God. Which was a lie, as God knows. He nodded, blessed me, rode on, his bags of rice molded to my sleeping shape.

The doors were open to me, and on the wooden bench I lay, my sack beneath my head. I didn’t sleep, but dreamed. The windows gold and green, sun shaking through the glass. I let my legs melt, my arms around myself, my eyes open to the light. No man came to visit, no hazy vision. No lord on a cross dripped blood upon my cheek. Nothing there but light, and I swallowed it and it filled my limbs. I was hungry and forgot my hunger and though I never slept, I never felt so still. The air deepened. I kept swallowing. No one had come to prod me, none to save me. The light inched away. Still dense enough for a child to ride on. It did not take away the hope when it was gone. In the dark, I chewed the edge of my sleeve, sweat-salted, and my tongue whispered me away. I was a well man, wrapped in the windows of God.

That night, long and smooth, was a single faith. In the morning the light, shifting east, had left. The building was brick again. I slept and snored until a man in vestments roused me. It was Sunday, he said, and time for service. Would I stay? I did, sat in the back while the women and their men filed in. They spoke with a familiar strangeness. Strung together words I knew. They kneeled and stood and sang. I saw one weeping.

After, the man asked if I sought relief. I nodded and he set me many labors. I could now do anything without surprise. There was no blood here but wine, no hardship but the heat. This was
a man who smiled and softly. Was I too old for it to touch me? I asked where the wooden closet was, but he said here they did not tell each other sins, only God. He showed me a cabin behind his home and gave me a blanket for the cold. Slaves lived there once, he said, so it smells sometimes still of sadness. I helped him dig his fields in trade for the cabin and the blanket. I earned nothing, but I was not a slave. My body had begged for a refuge, had sought out this field. I was being kept from nothing. I soaked up peace like I had never seen it, and maybe I had never seen it.

We put in crops and cut wood and built a wallow for pigs and bought pigs and went to church on Sunday, though sometimes him and not me. We had a little snow, but soon hot and mostly hot. Some folk thought I was mute, and those liked me best. In a year, he gave me part of his land to farm. The yield being mine to eat or sell. When he met a woman who would be his wife, she asked for it back. He said he’d given it in good faith, it was no longer his to claim. I was surprised a churchman could marry, knowing only the master of the crows, who was only and always alone. But he said everyone has a heart for love. I saw he was blind, but I said nothing. In my new field, all my own, I planted corn. He said it was not wet enough for rice. I planted squash because seeds were cheap but would not eat it, the watery slick, so sold what grew. I planted sunflowers and pretended they were sown wild. Weeds, I called them, and watered them at night. I only visited the man now when he asked. There was a woman in the house, so I was careful. I kept to myself. I knew now to keep to myself, that was how it would be.

Though I was alone, I saw what it was to belong. The minister taught me family, the town taught me town. People moving in
circles round each other. Peeling open the neighbor’s weakness and his joy. I was the only one alone, so I could see. Words and touches like bits of light. A man sees a man in the street, a hand on the shoulder, a cap tipped, spark of light. Women knotting the bonnets of babies, more light. All this giving without asking. Myself on the outside, a dark spot, but calm. This was a good place. I had felt no whips. I had not heard God’s rumble. If I stayed here a hundred years, someone would touch my shoulder.

But in between all the goodness, the town was dwindling. I had seen the dying before, but not so many so fast. I stayed on the edges of it. Watched. Tried not to make friends, though most everyone was kind. Fevers here ran swift, and not just among the young. Some left for fear. The fort was falling down that had held the British off, then held the British. A boy threw a crumbled brick through a window of the church. It was left broken. Broomstraw grew where the grains had been, and goat’s rue. It was a plague without a name. I didn’t know the medicine for this disease. Sterrett had left me nothing. As the souls slipped off, I saw the world was pulling in its edges. Was shrinking around me. That soon it would just be me, and then I too would go, and this was not sad. A crab tucking into its shell for the long evening. I dug graves for the victims, held their coffins going down as I had once held hands with the dying. The forty families winnowed to twelve, and five.

And then she appeared.

New to town, orphaned old, ward of a maiden aunt. She was Dorchester born, had gone to the free school where girls were numbered. Had known the town when it jostled. Left before it decayed. She wore the fabrics of the city, had a hat with paper flowers. I saw her first in church.

No, before that. I was a boy and I was dreaming.

Straw hair and eyes a color I couldn’t name. Later she told me blue. She moved in circles in my dream. She had wings. She spoke in words that didn’t sound. She looked just like herself. I was a boy, and when I woke, my shirt was wet with sweat. My father still alive, and I had never known a woman. But she knew me. Had found me as a boy, left me in a marsh with crows for mothers, left me with my hands in blood and gore, led me here to a prairie of religion. The church on a hill, my cabin in a field, my crops in a row. The minister had tempered me. I was ready for her.

I saw Anne in her body first in church. The hat, and a blue dress for her eyes. I didn’t speak, but looked and looked. Sunday next, I had milkweed in my hand. It was summer and all was blooming. As she left on small shod feet, I dropped them in her path. I shook too much for reaching out, for greeting. She smiled and knelt and before her hand touched the stems I fled. Sunday next, she brought the first of the goldenrods and laid them on the last bench. The bench where I sat unseen, having no holeless shirt, no well-soled shoes. Sunday next, she sat beside me, and when we bent to pray I took her hand. She tried to shake me free. I clung harder. With her other hand she pinched my ribs. I scowled and squeezed again. She laughed. She laughed in the middle of a song, so none heard. She told me I had a fine face.

I knew not what to do, so with my bone knife I cut a stick. Cut it like my father, but in place of vermin carved a bird. Took her past the empty fort to the Ashley River. The water settled me. If something happened, I’d thought since a boy, a river would carry me away. We lay beneath the bell of a willow and mingled hands and from my shirt I brought the bird. A wooden wren,
a jenny wren, she called it. She told me wishes. She wished a house and fields and a rose garden like a lady, and I stopped listening to wrap her arms about my neck. I sat there, held, while she dreamed, and the river flowed.

I had believed that love was a difficult road. That the beloved would trick you, would tease, would let you burn. Would shoot a musket at your chest. Love was something got, not given. But here she was who looked at my eyes and let her hands be held. When I was weary she moved her hands upon my arms. When I sorrowed, she dug for the roots of it until I’d told her every past lash, every man I’d known. I gave her buds and bread and stones and she gave me surprise and kisses. She had been loved once, cruelly, and me not being cruel earned me her. This is what she said. But
earn
was not right at all. She came in spite of myself. The iced quick of me was melting. In fall when the birds were on their wings, I asked her would she stay with me forever. She would, she said. I asked her why.

“You’re a good man,” she said. “With such a heart.”

“And we will be like this always.”

“Till Jesus takes us,” she said and smiled.

I said we would have a child. Two, she said. Four, I said. Till we counted to eleven and thought that sounded right. All would live, and all would prosper. She wanted to call them after flowers. I searched for my father’s name, but in my years of remembering, I had lost that. I wanted to name one after my father, I said, and knowing, she never asked what it was. All days were days of sun. My chest was built of bubbles. I kissed her and was nothing but warmth.

I met her aunt when I asked to marry Anne. She seemed not to mind. The aunt was dying slowly. Her eyes were milky and
she looked above my shoulder when I spoke. Rubbed my hand and said I had a fate. Fates are almost always good, she said, and smiled toothless. She nodded at my shoulder. She placed Anne’s hand in mine. A fate for a fate, she said.

WE MARRIED IN
December. It was 1786, the tenth year of the independence, and I was twenty-three.

As the town was dying, we built a home. That is, we took a home. I made a new door and she washed the walls white. She planted a dog rose by the window. I cut a path to my old fields. I could have planted acres, been a man who owned men, but the town was not hungry enough. I bought a horse and a whip and took my crops to Charleston. In the spring evenings, she read to me aloud. The gospels and the psalms. “All your children shall be taught by the Lord,” she read, “and great shall be the peace of your children.” Great shall be the peace of our children, I said. “The glory of children is their fathers,” she read. Yes. I would be the glory of my children. Just as my father. No, not my father. I saw him burying wood rats in the dry dirt. I looked to my whip in the corner of the room. My children would be the glory. I was nothing.

At night, if the candles were out and we were not sleepy, she would talk. “My parents?” she’d say. “They weren’t wealthy, of course, but laughed more than anyone I knew. My mother had a little flute that she would take to the poorhouse to play, and my father could jig, so everyone that saw them caught a glow. Faith, to me, was this. Charity was making men smile.”

You make me smile.

“You have a smile like my father’s. There was plenty to eat, though it was plain, and I had a dozen friends at school who
would come once a week to make paper figures and melt chocolate if we could get it. There was a washline between our house and the neighbor’s, and the girls and I would send messages out by clothespin and wait for replies that never came. There was always an animal at our house being mended by my mother, and we’d play at doctor, feeding a sparrow or knitting a harness for a lame dog. It was a loud house, busy with love.”

You miss it.

“I do miss it, but if my parents could be revived and I were sent back to them, I would miss being with you. There are two sides to life, the noisy and the soft, and you’re my soft. But our children will change all that. You’ll have to build a barn for yourself to hide from all our bustle. This is what love does, it keeps getting bigger. You know that, of course. Think of those years when you had none of it. It didn’t go away, did it?”

She said this with a smile. I thought briefly that she knew nothing of sorrow, and briefly I didn’t trust her.

Finally by summer she began to grow. I had wondered but not asked and now she was growing. I held her belly and waited for the child. Was hungry to begin on another. Love could not come fast enough. Now that all days were days of sun. When she was sick, I worried. She’d heave her stomach once, then say she was well. And she was. I prayed at her. I told the heavens to cast an eye on her rounding body. What a marvel they had made. An infant, the fruit of me. He was swathed in his mother. He was shy. He was a seed invisible. Whatever strange herbs she ate, midwife-given, I ate too. We bathed in the river together. When I felt her belly, she felt mine.

“What will we call it?”