Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (30 page)

“I think the best thing to do is send Newt on up the road,” Tanner said to the women. “If he drops, one of us can go fetch him. If the juju is broke for sure, he’ll make it past the general store. Then we’ll know for sure.” All four of them were up early. “If one of you go out, I’m not sure I could get you back to the house before the juju took your soul altogether. If I go out, the two of you can’t drag me back, and I’m dead for sure. Best thing is to send our boy because he’s light enough to run with. Plus somebody has to perform the rites over Glenn.”

Jessie looked at Flora and so did Tanner. Newt was everybody’s child, but he was Flo’s boy. She would have to make the say. “Newt big enough to walk down the highway by himself. He’s been wanting to since he started walking,” Flo said, not trying to conceal her smile. “This going to be the first time he walked down the road. Four years old and the boy never walked down the road leading to his own house.”

Newt made it a quarter of a mile off the grounds before his calves lost their way and he slipped into the couch grass. Tanner stood watching, the NO VACANCY sign alit behind her like a solitary headlight. Tanner, leading her body with her left foot and then stepping with her right foot, walked out toward the boy. Every step was lighter than the last, the marrow in her bones being pulled away from her heart and out of her skin. It did not hurt, this dying, it was more like wrestling a witch off your back – involuntary paralysis of body but total control of mind. When she reached Newt he was supine, tufts of couch grass in his hands. He was holding on. Tanner dragged Newt back to the motel by his left leg, her cane eating through the soil. She left his body at the bottom of the porch steps, having dragged it as far as she could before collapsing just steps away.

“Why didn’t Newt make it, Flo?” Jessie asked. Her eyes were tired but no water fell from them. “This was supposed to be all over, but it ain’t. We going to die here and Maud coming to collect our souls.” The two women were crouched over the bodies of Newt and Tanner, pressing cold rags against their foreheads.

“I don’t know what’s doing, Jessie, but we need to get to that grave and move that man on to where he got to go next.” Flo looked down at her child, his loose pants and plaid buttoned shirt, his eyes flickering every few minutes. The blood running from his nose. He was fighting it. Soon his heart would start beating again and his color would return. Harder for children to come back from the dead after their soul’s been snatched from them. First time Miss Flora tried to leave the grounds, it felt like a pebble found its way into her shoe, snaked up her leg, and then went straight through her lungs. Wasn’t so much pain as it was surprise. Like someone snatched a piece of fruit from a tree inside her and kept snatching and snatching and instead of taking the last piece of fruit or letting it drop to the ground for harvest, they stood on their tiptoes, opened their mouth to the branch and ate her seed and stem and all. Even after she came out of it and understood she couldn’t leave the grounds, Flo would still try every now and again, checking her shoe for the elusive pebble when she came to.

“I don’t understand why we have to ask a dead man to move on,” Jessie said. “Every time Maud sends one of her boys out here I end up standing up for them in her place. Don’t make no kind of sense.”

“What don’t make sense is that they can come back. That don’t make sense. Feels like sense to make sure a dead man is really dead to me.”

Jessie thought on it. “Well what if somebody pulls up for a room and sees the two of them spread out here like this?”

“Nobody stopping for a room with two dead-looking niggers out front. Let’s go.” Flo and Jessie walked around to the back of the motel where hours before they threw a warm body into a new grave. They held hands and repeated the same words at the same time again and again.
Leave from here. It’s safe to go. Leave from here. It’s safe to go. Leave from here. It’s safe to go.
Their clasped hands looked like prayer, but their heads weren’t bowed and neither dared to close their eyes.

Tanner ascended the porch steps as the women returned. She opened her mouth to greet them, but her voice had not returned from the other side of life. Miss Flora bent down to scoop up Newt’s body, his bare feet dirtying the front of her trousers. She cradled his neck with her right hand and kissed his small face. “I better get you washed and put to bed, little baby,” she said into her son’s neck. Jessie rubbed Newt’s back as soon as Miss Flora got him close enough to touch. Tanner watched the boy’s dangling feet and thought of him as an infant, before he could walk. “We thought we lost you, boy, out there in that couch grass like that. C’mon back and come see us. We waiting for you, hear me Newt? Mama here. Auntie Jessie here. Uncle Tanner right here. We’ll be right here when you wake up.”

Tanner stuck her free hand into Jessie’s hair, her other hand gripped around the porch railing. She massaged Jessie’s scalp while looking out to the road at passing cars. “Nobody dying just yet. We gotta get this place ready for guests. No bookings since the Campbells left.” The three of them had scrubbed the parlor shortly after they took Glenn out to bleed him, so that was one less thing to be done, but there was still food to be made, linens to take out, and the porch needed mopping with boiled water and salt.

Miss Flora headed upstairs with Newt, while Tanner went to the backyard after the mop bucket and Jessie moved pots and pans around in the kitchen. Today was the largest supper day of the week. Folks expected a family meal on a Sunday evening. Even the man who grew up eating nothing except corn mush and butter expected a decent Sunday dinner on a Sunday afternoon. Jessie stacked her ingredients all over the countertop, opening a cabinet door and reaching for everything by memory; Flora kept a well-run kitchen with everything in its place. Jessie rubbed birds down with salt, paprika, sage, and black pepper and stuck white onions, garlic, and several carrots into the hole where their hearts used to beat.

Flo came downstairs and washed her hands so she could help Jessie. “Where’s Tanner?”

Jessie kept her hands and eyes on the dough she was kneading, “Tanner mopping the front down with saltwater. How’s Newt? Sleep yet?”

“Newt’s fine. I rubbed him all over with rum and laid him on his side until his nose stops bleeding.”

“What nose-bleeding you talking about, Miss Flora?” Tanner asked, coming into the kitchen for more water. “Newt ain’t been having nosebleeds.”

“I thought it might be peculiar but then I figured he was having a tough time getting back from the other side. No fever, no sweats, but his nose is bleeding.”

“Out the nose, huh?”

“Where else you bleed from, Tanner? Yes, out his nose.”

“Let’s all go check him. Jessie wash your hands good and grab the salt.”

Jessie and Flo turned to Tanner with widened eyes but nothing to say. Flo retraced the morning in her head: the four of them up early, deciding to send Newt down the road, feeling happy, Newt laid out in the couch grass, Tanner gone to get him, Tanner’s cane tip covered in dust, Newt’s skinny feet, Newt in the bathtub cradled in her arm the way she used to nurse him. His heartbeat returned, shallow. Nothing was different about the boy except the blood coming from his nose. And who doesn’t bleed a little coming back to life?

Tanner wiped her brow with the back of her hand and wiped the sweat from it on her pant leg. “I used to know a boy whose nose bled all the time. Boy was bumped up and bruised up all over his body. Lost a tooth and bled for two gotdamn weeks. Couldn’t go to school, couldn’t go out to play. Those kids with it bad like that don’t live past eleven, twelve.”

“With what, Tanner?” Jessie asked.

“Doctors called it hemophilia. I known it to be called bleeding. Just bleeding.”

“Bleeding? I never heard of no children bleeding, Tanner, where you get this mess from?” Jessie demanded.

Miss Flora interrupted Jessie’s question, her arms folded. “But what happened to the boy? What happened to the little boy you knew?”

“He died, Miss Flora, he died and every time he died, his mama brought him right back.” Tanner didn’t wait for her women to piece the puzzle of it together. “Glenn was Maud’s favorite boy. And her last.”

Jessie grabbed onto Tanner and Flo just stared. “You trying to tell me there’s a haint in my boy, Tanner? You trying to tell me the boy upstairs ain’t my own? Like I didn’t spend the last half hour washing his ass, you going to tell me that ain’t Newt up there?”

“Miss Flora, I’m not saying you wrong, I’m saying we should go check. Can we go check on the boy?”

“You want to go check on my boy with salt in your hands? That’s what you want to do?”

“I’m afraid so, Miss Flora.”

“Jess, you hear this woman? This woman climb in your bed and mines the same and now she talking about killing my son.”

“I ain’t talking about killing, Flo, I said let’s check him.”

“Checking sounding a lot like killing. Ain’t nobody killing my child but me. You got that? Only shot’ll be fired is mine.”

Tanner opened Newt’s bedroom door and found the boy sitting up in bed putting on his shoes, trickles of blood hanging from his nostrils. Jessie and Flo flanked Tanner’s sides, Jessie with a fistful of salt, Flo carrying a musket.

“Glenn, you got to leave this place,” Tanner said. The boy did not look up from lacing his shoes. “I said Glenn, you got to leave this place now.”

The boy looked at the trio, stood and walked toward them. “That’s exactly what I intend to do, Uncle Tanner. I’m going to bring this body back to Maud like she told me.”

“What you say, haint?” Flora screamed at the boy, aiming the gun off-center.

Newt began to laugh. “So it is in life, so it is in death. Heard something you didn’t like, woman? I can’t call her Uncle Tanner no more? You didn’t like that?” The boy put one hand on his hip and continued, “Maud found a way to settle this here debt of Tanner’s. Nine sons for one. Nine boys for one boy. That’s the new math. All my brothers and me for Newt.”

Miss Flora let off a shot over the child’s shoulder. “You ain’t leaving here with my boy, haint.”

“I don’t think you got much of a choice, Flora, seeing as your boy is dead. He died out there in the couch grass this morning. I’m just wearing him. He died a
natural death.
Tanner is a fan of that, those natural deaths. Your boy gone on, girl. You and your friend sent his soul off mighty right this morning. He dancing right now with the little colored niggers on the colored side of heaven. How you like that?”

The man-boy passed between Jessie and Tanner. Neither of them moved to stop him. The man-boy called out over his shoulder as he marched down the steps, “Your debt is clear. Nine sons and one son paid in full.” Then he twisted the door handle, walked off the porch, made it past the quarter of a mile mark where Newt had dropped dead that very morning, and kept on going.

Miss Flora laid out on the floor like a pile of dirty clothes. Tanner sat on Newt’s bed. Jessie went downstairs first, salt in fist. The sun was high. She closed the front door hard, turned the VACANCY sign on and stood at the lobby desk, waiting.

Art by Janet Chui

1589
Innsbruck, Austria

Crouching behind a lilac bush, I remove my jewelry, my stiff brocade dress, my farthingale and undergarments. I untie the ribbon garters and remove my hose. I run my hands over my body, feeling it finally free. Without those constricting little shoes, my feet sink into the earth’s embrace.

“Anubis,” I say. “I am here.”

I enter the dense forest. It is massive, and very dark. I can hear movement in the trees. The archduke has stocked the hundred acres with animals from all over – deer, stags, wolves, boar, birds, bats, snakes. Somewhere out there is a camel, I’ve heard. But that is not what I seek tonight.

When I am far enough from the castle, I climb a tree and drop over the wall of the hunting preserve into the fields below. I felt safe with the animals in the forest, but now I do not. The howling has started, and I must go before they breach the walls.

My father was a gift to King Henri II of France. I believe it was on the occasion of Henri’s twenty-first birthday, which would have made it March 31, 1540. Though he was the second son, Henri had become the Dauphin after his elder brother dropped dead four years earlier from drinking a cold glass of water following a vigorous game of tennis. (The poor nobleman who gave him the water was literally torn apart by horses on suspicion of having poisoned the heir.) At the time of the birthday I speak of, Henri had already been married for seven years to Catherine de Medici, and had a lover, Diane de Poitier, twenty years his senior.

I like to imagine the scene: it’s a big party. People in velvet and the finest brocade are milling about, drinking wine. There are pipers, and drummers, and a tambourine with ribbons. Henri has typically French eyes: dark, hooded, slightly derisive, atop a long aquiline nose made for sneering. The royal pate sports a plumed
chapeau
.

Henri is fond of dogs and loves hunting, so when Diane comes towards him with a wriggling, hairy object wrapped in a blanket in her arms, he assumes it’s a puppy. His wife, Catherine, watches in annoyance – she loathes her husband’s mistress and, after his death, will banish the woman. Diane sets the bundle down on the table and removes the blanket.