My Soul to Keep (19 page)

Trees, whenever he contemplated them, reminded Dawit of Adele.

While Kira played with Teacake and one of her dolls at the mouth of the cave below, Dawit straddled the V-curve where the trunk of the front yard’s thirty-foot orchid tree diverged upward into sturdy branches. He angled his lopping shears to prune away withering, dead branches above him, slicing with precision above the dark rings at each branch’s base. He was careful not to cut below the rings, or else the tree would not be able to mend its wounds properly. In the fall, the tree would awaken with lavender blooms that would make them the envy of their block.

There was nothing quite so splendid and reliable as nature.

Dawit could not ruminate long on the tree’s beauty, however, because memories interrupted. He was never able to look upon a tree with the same fondness after one had been conscripted as an agent in his eternal separation from Adele.

goddamn nigger bitch scratched my face

gimme that rope, Will

That one had been a sinister tree, devoid of leaves, with thick branches grasping like claws, a lone tree at the bank of the Mississippi. Dawit could remember, as soon as he’d seen it, that the tree’s look unsettled him. It was dead, nearly black, yet it stood upright. The dead tree in the waist-high saw grass was an omen, he knew. Best they shouldn’t rest near that tree.

Seth, I’m thirsty. We ain’t gon’ stop but a minute.

It was Adele’s stubbornness he’d loved. Her stubbornness brought her with him, trailing after him a full six hours before she let on with her birdcall that she’d come too. She wanted to go to freedom, despite his argument that she should not risk her life to escape when he could surely arrange to buy her himself in a short time. Dawit’s heart had stopped when he heard the whistle from the brush behind him. His legs ached from fatigue and his heart ached from missing her, and he’d thought of going back to fetch her. Could that be Adele’s call … ?

Adele?

You sho’ ain’t gon’ leave me that easy, is you?

Dawit had often wondered, for more than a century since, how his life might have been different if they had never stopped beneath that wretched tree.

“Daddy, it’s getting dark,” Kira called up. “The ghost will be here soon. You’re in her tree.”

“It’s not dark yet. Just a bit longer and I’ll be finished, Kira. Night Song won’t mind having me here.”

Even Kira’s voice could not pull Dawit away from reliving that horrible day, the day he mourned in vivid dreams, replaying the short sequence of events as though hindsight could alter the past.

It was clear from the surprised faces of the white men—five of them—who emerged from the woods that they were not patrollers. They were random laborers—loggers, he guessed, from the ropes coiled across their shoulders. They were sharing a jug of liquor, on their way to rest at the riverbank. The men walked toward them, nearly jolly in their manner, already perilously close.

Well, lookie here

We got us some runaways?

It would be foolish to try to outrun them. Better to negotiate, Dawit decided. He hadn’t added Adele’s name to his pass, but he could convince them so long as he played his role and didn’t insult them. They probably couldn’t read themselves.

Then, before he could speak, the situation became grave.

The youngest, barely a man yet, sidled behind Adele and wrapped a thick arm around her middle. He playfully planted his hand across her chest, squeezing her breast. “You wanna nurse me, Auntie?”

Dawit knew then, from the expression on Adele’s face, that he would have no opportunity to intervene. Another woman might have simply trembled or tolerated the man’s touch. Adele could not.

Goddamn!

Without turning, Adele had whipped her arm around to rake her sharpened thumbnail across the man’s face, drawing a strip of bright blood from his cheekbone to his forehead.

All smiles and mirth were gone. As a warrior, Dawit knew that whenever blood was drawn, talking was finished.

You see that?

Nigger bitch

He and Adele could stand to fight, or they could flee. Without weapons, could they hope to prevail against five men? No. They could not.

Adele, run!

In the end, was it his own act—and not Adele’s—that sealed the day’s horror? He’d hoped to frighten the men, or at least to draw attention away from Adele so she could escape. After all, his death meant very little.

He’d leaped onto the man closest to him, the biggest, and cracked his neck with a simple, skillful twist of his arm. All of them heard the sound. There was no doubt, when the wide-eyed man slumped to the ground, that he was dead.

It did not frighten the men away. Instead, it roused a fevered fury. And Adele, whose skirts were soggy and heavy from the river, could not be quick enough.

Git her ‘fore she swims away

Dawit was halfway bound, wincing beneath their blows, as he watched the bleeding man drag Adele to the riverbank, beneath the solitary tree. He was pulling at her clothing. One of the men tossed a heavy hemp rope across the tree’s sturdiest branch.

Bring her here

Dawit knew what was going to happen next. He saw it happening in his imagination beforehand, and he could not stop it.

You like killin’, nigger? You ‘bout to see some

Adele did not call for him. She never once made a sound.

Watching what the four men did to her while he was bound and helpless, Dawit’s reason dissolved. He kicked and shouted and writhed, spittle flying across his face. He sometimes imagined he’d won his senses back since then; more often, he knew he had not.

Dawit’s own lynching was a comfort to him after what he had seen. Death put his sick heart to sleep.

Why did he have to reawaken? Why?

No wonder his love for Christina had felt so weak. He’d no room in his heart left for Christina then, only sixty years after Adele’s death. Christina’s father, who ran a thriving funeral home in Chicago, gave them the best wedding he could afford. Hundreds of colored men and women turned out to witness their union, to see Christina’s lithe form in a splendid white gown.

He’d had no such wedding with Adele. They made silent vows to each other, sharing their flesh in love. He always kept his seed away from her so they could not make a child who would never truly belong to her. And so, though he’d been instructed to stud her, he’d been enabled to love her instead. Often, they merely lay together in an embrace, not sleeping, not fully awake.

When he met Jessica at last, he had long ago soothed away his hurt. He had been ready for her, a woman nearly unblemished by life’s tragedies, for whom he could become anyone he chose. In the process, he could forget his own sorrows. He had been waiting for her.

“Daddy, you’re going to fall,” Kira called, sounding troubled.

“I have a ladder, sweetheart. I’m not going to fall.”

Dawit’s perch was twenty feet above the ground. The tall, aluminum stepladder was at least four feet beneath his dangling black combat boots. From here, he could survey the nuances of the house he had refurbished inside and out when he bought it ten years before. The paint was cracking near the base of his second- story bedroom window, he observed. He would need to touch it up after the blistering heat of the upcoming summer.

Dawit realized that Kira was right, however. It was seven-thirty, nearly too dark to see by now, even with his superb vision. Jessica would be home from work soon, assuming she hadn’t stopped at her mother’s place first to help her plan Uncle Billy’s funeral.

Dawit snipped his shears once more, clipping the final piece of dead wood he hoped would make room for a bud in the fall. Only as he watched the wood drop, spinning toward the ground, did he pause to ponder his own unfathomable indifference.

Uncle Billy. With his own hands, he had killed a sickly old man who had done him no harm. Even game animals, he reminded himself, know they can often elicit mercy from some predators if they pretend to be sick or lame. Uncle Billy had not been afforded even this measure of natural decency when Dawit cracked his head against the bathtub rim with all of his might, he thought.

Yet, at this moment, Dawit felt no shame. Why would any man want to live as he’d been, so shriveled and useless? And it was justified! Uncle Billy had found a damning photograph, a precious treasure. That photograph, one Dawit didn’t even remember posing for, clearly begged for him to fulfill his Covenant. The resemblance was too precise to pass off as even a relation. His face looked the same now as it had then; as it had since the 1500s.

He could not bring himself to destroy the photo, though. He packed it inside of the small stack of records he took—after all, Uncle Billy certainly wouldn’t miss them now—and hid it away in the cabinet next to his clarinet. He couldn’t resist listening to the “Forever Man” record once he got home, and it served him right that Jessica had returned so quickly and nearly caught him playing it. He had been thinking of her as he listened. “I’m your Forever Man.” Jessica had not even been born when its lyrics first found his pen, but in his heart Dawit had written the song for her.

Behind him, from a taller live oak far above his reach, Dawit heard a whispered hissing growing higher pitched, to nearly a screech. Night Song was here, and her song sounded unusually disconsolate.

“Daddy! It’s the ghost in the tree!”

“I’m coming, Duchess,” Dawit said. He rested the shears across the branches in front of him and used his arms to support himself as he began to climb downward, his foot angling toward the top of the stepladder.

Before he could touch the ladder, a movement from the side of the house visible through the branches—something white—held Dawit rigid. Someone was there. A dark man in a white shirt had darted behind the toolshed, out of his sight in a simple instant. Dawit processed what he had seen, and he realized the man had been wearing a skullcap. He heard a rattling from his neighbor’s gate.

A Searcher!

Dawit’s mind was seized with so many conflicting impulses— to chase him, to shout, to climb higher so he could try to see him better, to take Kira and hide with her—that it dizzied him. He lost control of his heart’s frenetic pumping.

It wasn’t until Dawit heard Kira’s terrified shriek that he realized he was falling.

He bumped the ladder with his flailing arm on the way down, toppling it over, and inside tangled aluminum he felt his shoulder and forearm explode against the hard soil on the pathway below. His body bounced, ribs crunching, and then his head bumped so hard against the soil that his teeth clicked violently, slicing into his tongue, and he lost his vision to a shower of red sparks.

For a blissful instant, he felt nothing.

Then, the pain came.

At once, his senses seized upon every aspect of his frame that had been scraped, jounced, broken. His shoulder was horribly twisted out of place, paralyzing him. His ribs felt shattered.

Dawit howled.

The first thing Jessica noticed of the commotion in her front yard when she drove up was the toppled stepladder at the base of the tree, and she knew what had happened.

She knew why their elderly next-door neighbor, Mrs. DeNight, was stroking Kira’s head, trying to calm her red-faced sobs; she knew why David was lying prone beneath the tree while Mr. DeNight stood above him, his arms crossed before him.

David had said he would prune the orchid tree today. He had fallen, and he was dead.

“No!” she screamed, fumbling to open the car door while her engine still idled. “Oh,
Jesus.
”

Jessica fell to her knees at David’s side. She saw that his eyes were wide open, thank Jesus, and he was swallowing hard. “I’m all right,” he whispered, blinking back tears of pain.

Jessica’s heart leaped with momentary relief. David wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t all right. His shirt was torn, he was bleeding from his mouth, and there was something wrong with the way his arm was twisted behind him.

“Did someone call an ambulance?” she asked breathlessly.

“He wouldn’t let us,” Mr. DeNight said, pushing his thick tor- toiseshell glasses higher on his nose. He spoke with a fading Irish lilt and sounded nearly amused. “Says he’ll sue us.”

“What?” Jessica cried. She looked down at David with disbelief. “Are you crazy?”

“I’m fine. I don’t need an ambulance.” At this, with Mr. DeNight’s assistance, David struggled to sit upright. He held his injured arm, gritting his teeth.

Kira sobbed, running into Jessica’s arms. “Night Song pushed Daddy out of the tree.”

“Shhhhh, Kira. Don’t worry. That’s not what happened,” Jessica said absently, studying David to try to analyze his wounds. He was still wincing violently, possibly from some kind of internal injury. She would have to be insistent this time. His aversion to doctors was ridiculous. “David, what’s wrong with your arm?”