Snakeskin Road (34 page)

A creek ran beside one of the butterbean fields, and a fence line for another farm, Galtson, across the creek. The stream ran through a pine grove and that grove spread out and touched on several other fields of corn, and one pasture that was used for hay. They had already done at least two cuttings, the hay bales stacked on the far side like tall swirling comets, and the pasture had grown enough to be cut again into windrows for drying.

For days, the six had worked the butterbean field; but there were just too many overseers and other field slaves and the dogs were there. I counted four, all bull-mixes, and watched the workers bend against the sun, load bushels, turn along the rows. It was work I did when I was younger, when farmers used field hands instead of slaves. You had to get on your knees to pick the butterbeans at the ground, and the stems hard to pull. I watched them pick and pull for days and couldn’t figure out how to steal them away.

Sometimes you have to give up; you follow the night and morning routines but an opening just isn’t there. And I had stayed at Bixon too long, that uneasiness of land and trees around me too familiar.

Then on the fifth day, a culling gang went through the butterbeans to finish them off—nine slaves, one overseer,
his dog, and the tractor driver. Three of the slaves were deserters Teal Dennis had auctioned. I didn’t like that only three were out there, not after I handed seven into post just last week. But I kept telling myself, “Only your share—that’s what you take.”

The van was at the far side of the pasture by the hay bales, and I had walked to the pines, and through them to the edge of the butterbean field, the creek ran along it. At the other end was a logging road through hardwoods, deep-rutted, that opened into a long field of corn, and on the other side, another stand of pines, and a field of crowders and purple hulls where the other gangs had begun the harvest.

I scoped the driver—the edges of his round face, then to the center ear, his nose, and his large neck up to his hairline—short hair, curled white. The overseer was younger and his face long, narrow. They kept moving, I wouldn’t be able to get both cleanly. There was the dog, too, shifting in and out of the rows. I walked around the edge of the pines to the thicker hardwoods and waited.

It was a long day, around five when they were done, and the tractor came out first with the butterbean bushels on the rear trailer, followed by the truck with the field-workers locked in the back cage. It was the same type of cage used for hunting dogs. The overseer had the keys and his dog was up front.

I could no longer hear the other gangs working several fields over. The tractor’s engine quavered, chopped loud at the branches, and I placed the rifle against the swell of a maple, scoped the black center of the driver’s ear, and pulled the trigger. I checked the bolt, counted, shot into the truck, and the glass shattered.

The tractor driver fell under the rear wheel, but the ruts had been carved so deep from the logging that the tractor kept straight until it slipped into the cornfield and vanished. The truck, however, jolted to a stop, and the slaves fell into
one another moaning. They had been soundless killings, clean, but the dog was yelping, and I couldn’t get it sighted until it pushed around the overseer and through the shattered glass.

Forty yards. I fired, missed, but in its jump, the leash caught and jerked the dog’s speckled head up, left it hanging at the running board choking, scrambling. Took two more shots, and that last cry the dog made sailed through the branches, up into the air—the highest thing, I couldn’t keep from ascending. They would hear it in the other field.

So I took the keys from the ignition, opened the cage, tossed three ropes in, and told the others to tie the runaways’ hands. I had to point at “this one” and “this one,” threatening. They kept huddled to the back, “Don’t shoot,” they said, and “Mercy,” praying, wailing. Then I told the three to come out and they wouldn’t and I aimed the rifle in, said for the others to push them out.

There was a gap where no one moved, and that’s when I heard the dogs. The tractor had vanished into the corn and I couldn’t see through it, but that sound of dogs and trucks was just beyond us now, approaching.

I shot one of the slaves, one I didn’t want, and he fell over.

“Push them out,” I said, and this time the others did. I hooked the knotted ropes to the leash and headed the deserters across the bean field. Behind us, one slave jumped off the truck and started through the hardwoods, but the rest closed the steel door back, rolled the dead one to the front as a barricade. I could still hear them whimpering, hear their prayers.

By the time we got to the field edge, someone was shooting at us, coming on in a gray truck. I fired back, and we slipped through the pine grove. Between the canopy and the fallen straw, the air tightens into a stillness in a pine grove; you become aware of each breath, each step by the trees sewn perfect into the earth, that stillness working against
your motion, wanting you to stop. But you don’t. You accelerate from bole to bole, the sun cutting paths of light across you, then darkness, then the same light like breath as if you can breathe in light and dark, keep them and make them into you and you into them.

There was no road through here; the gray truck would have to stop at the field’s edge, so we got to the pasture easy, and the women kept running despite the shirts, men’s shirts that hung to their knees sweaty and catching. Still, the deserters had been running faster since the gunfire, and my van was just beyond the hay bales on a field road. It met up with the creek and turned onto a dirt road that became County 46, and only a few miles to State 13.

But halfway into the field, a dog crossed from the pines, brown and coaled, and I knew we were not faster than any dog, so I wrapped the leash tighter around my hand, pulled, and did not look behind me in the grass whirring.

I tried to think of the distance, how little of it remained, hoping that was enough to will us to the end.

Suddenly the leash jerked my arm and shoulder back, pulled all of us into the seeding grass like we had caught a large fish. But it was the other way—the dog had caught us and taken down the last one.

It’s said in Matthew, “If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.” So I cut the leash where it held her and pulled the other two up, untangled them, and we left that woman on the ground to fight the brown dog with her hands still tied.

As we neared the end of the field, a second dog jumped the last woman and this time I felt my shoulder pop. She yelled like the other one had. I cut her rope to us, and this dog turned, locking its bite, a yellow dog like the ones in my dreams. I fired, killed it—but I knew it would come again and again for me, would never be dead.

The overseers were in the pasture now taking aim, scoping us, as the other dogs swam through the grass.

Only one slave was left. She was running slower even without having to carry the others, breathless; there were shots; we kept past the hay bales and they were coming and the dogs were coming, and my shoulder I didn’t know if it would hold.

We ran along pines that cut the sunlight in and out as if the Lord was cutting the length of the light upon us himself, what He would allow us to have, to give, enough. I shoved her up front in the cab and drove off in the shots firing.

It was when we got on County 46 that she slumped against her door, and I thought fainted, but I found the blood pooling in her seat, and pushed her arm, “Hey,” I said, “we made it out.” Pushed again, but she didn’t move. I grabbed her black hair, pulled it to the side, and watched those closed eyelids, didn’t dare open them, didn’t want to see them.

Just like that my luck had run the other way. I kept that dead body until the next morning when I crossed the dead zone above the Natchez Trace and cut the engine and looked down that line where nothing grew, the vultures working on the carcasses still and flies grinding in angry black spots, and across that border, the wet grass verdant, the branches and leaves catching the wind turning. I rolled the window down to hear that shushing rise, cease, rise. It cleared the air of the smell of blood. And I knew I had to dump that body in one of those places, but I sat there as if she were still dreaming and would wake up. Then I’d drive to the post, collect my bounty.

   That night my mother got snakebit, I didn’t go home to Granddaddy and Theo. I was afraid Mam would show up, or never show up. The more I thought about it, the more I decided I didn’t want to find out what happened. So I
hitched to Lexington and worked on horse farms there and farther south in tobacco and cotton fields; I’ve worked my share of purple hulls and peach orchards, too. I had an eye for surveying, knowing the full measure of a farmer’s land, could tell the bale yield of his cotton just by looking over the acres in July. I started riding shotgun on drug runs with other field-workers, and read the Bible until I was done with it, and wouldn’t step into a church.

Once I started driving, I ran drugs and guns along the Cumberland Parkway and north and south through the Gap. When I got older, I was a carrier along the Southeastern Desert border, and a
guia
, then a hunter. But in my twenties, when I made those runs to the city-states, when the city-states were just forming, I avoided Newport every time I came near Cincinnati.

But one afternoon after finishing a run to the Licking River, I took Highway 9 to Monmouth and followed the streets down to Twelfth and Anne. Granddaddy wasn’t in the yard in his rusted chair, his faded coat, the chair was gone, and a chain-link fence had been put in. I opened the latch, walked up to the door, nervous as hell about it, but I did it. A woman answered.

She had thin black hair, not at all like my mother’s curls, though they could’ve been the same age, and a cross around her neck and an old work shirt that must’ve been her husband’s because it fit her too big. It had dirty stripes that begged for washing, and her nose jutted out like a rudder, pulling up the center of her lip; her lip had a gash on one side, a scar from when something gouged it or she hit something. She told me that she’d bought the house from the bank and had never known any Lewis families, and her mouth stayed open like there was more to say, but for a long time, she just looked at me, studying, and said nothing.

“You could check at the courthouse,” she finally said and messed her hair, ruffled the back feathers of it as if that cooled her off. It was a hot day and heat was drifting out
from behind her where the fans were blowing, doing no good.

I looked out across the porch where I used to sit. It was empty, no chair, but my legs already had that pull in them and my shoulders leaned, but that was all, just that leaning toward. It was afternoon and the light was doing like it did those years ago, strips of it coming under the overhang, only Mam wasn’t on the rail, humming.

“Are you all right?” the woman said; she had stepped back into the house and latched one hand to the doorknob.

“No, ma’am,” I said, “I’m not all right. Not one bit of me.” I was shaking—too many ghosts here I knew of and couldn’t find, and I backed away from her. I had worried her enough. I thanked her and she was already shutting the door and locking it; she said nothing else.

I drove up Grandview to Biehl, got out, walked over the clearing. People had thrown trash, even old refrigerators and ovens, rusting, junk thrown down the side of the cliff, and that’s where I sat, where the tabernacle had been staked years ago, and closed my eyes, imagining the angles of the lamps, the shadows they cast onto the green ceiling. I could hear Preacher Spoon’s cadence, his breathlessness, and feel the snake roll in my hands that was not of me, and Mam, where was Mam?

The mustiness of the canvas was in the firmament still, and the voices striking against one another struck into me. When I opened my eyes, the tears had stopped and left the rooftops blurring into a rivulet tucked and sloping toward the dingy wall on Fifth, graffitied now with charred inscriptions and bright splashed letters. I could make out the word
SO
in orange and the number
29
, and beyond that the terraces and balconies of Cincinnati in a gray smog dissipating.

I always delivered my cargo to the edge-towns of city-states. I never been inside one, will always keep on the outside of that world.

• • •

   I still don’t know if Mam is dead or not, but the Lord never did me any favors. The more I read of Him, the more I lost the threads of myself. And I decided, after my time in Newport, not to look for those people, my people. I decided they did not exist.

   It was October when I left Adamsville. After the mess at Bixon, I didn’t want to go out, but every day I looked at those pictures, the ones I had taken at Pickwick Landing and Pilot Oak, Kentucky, and I knew there were five runaways that had gone on to Cairo and beyond it. One had curls like Mam. The whole time at Pickwick she wouldn’t look at the farmers bidding, kept staring at those on the auction block; she saw herself there, just like them, afraid.

One of the women had blond hair that was long in back, short bangs, and her slitted eyes kept working against her rawboned cheeks whenever she closed them; she tried to keep her eyes closed, maintain her focus on the ground.

The next one had black hair, thick, and the lines, you couldn’t tell it in the picture, but they were strong for such a young face, and a girl beside her—they held hands at both auctions; the woman with the lines, she refused to let go of that girl.

The last woman was shorter than the others, even the girl; she kept her hair pulled off her face so you could see all of it like a bald mountain scored by the wind, brown skin, baked, her eyes set deep, the lines of her mouth turned inward, unopened. I knew what Granddaddy would say about her.

The photos were two-inch squares that fit in the center of my palm. I took them out one at a time, sometimes I pasted all the photos against the sweat in my hand, and kept them in my pockets, and I burned the others, their faces to ash.