Sweet Song (2 page)

“That the oldest?” Martha asked.

“Yes, ma’am. He come out and said stack the hay ready for feedin’, then help in the fields. I done the stackin’, then went to Pa like they tell me.”

“I believe him,” Martha said.

Edna laughed at her. “Don’t matter what you believe. Only matter what the white boys say.”

“We’ll see.”

Edna stepped to the door as if she was in a huff. “Maybe we see how special yo’ family be now. See how special Bess is, too.”

“We suppose’ to stick together,” Martha said.

“We was,” Edna said. “We did too, til the evil come on us.”

“The evil,” Tunny echoed.

Martha ran at the door. “Shoo!”

When Tunny was gone, she turned to Edna. “Bess ain’t the only woman done—”

Edna interrupted. “No, but he the only child look like that.” Her long finger pointed at Leon.

“He ain’t got nothin’ to do with how he looks.”

Edna huffed again and double-stepped down the path, her two boys falling in line.

Standing in the doorway, Martha yelled to them, “Ain’t no evil here. And ain’t none comin’.” She walked back to her corner. “Come here and sit with me a spell. They be comin’ soon if they not already here.”

No sooner did she take Leon into her arms, Fred Carpenter Senior came through the doorway. His head appeared first, like an olive colored mask. The man’s wavey hair shook as his jerky, unsure movements settled to a calm. Fred’s slight frame removed nothing from his regained sense of authority.

“Ain’t nobody done nothin’ wrong,” Martha shouted.

“No need to speak up. I hear just fine,” Fred said.

Leon saw in the man a kindness rather than an anger, and didn’t know what to make of it.

“Yes sir,” Martha said. “Can I speaks for the boy, sir?”

Fred’s answer was interrupted as Bess pushed into the room around him. She ran for Leon and held him. His body stiffened out of habit, even though her hug was firm rather than light and ticklish. He felt as if he might throw up again.

“I didn’t—“ Leon stopped and swallowed.

“Shush, now,” Bess told him. With her head turned from Leon’s gaze, Bess looked into Fred’s shoulder. “He’s my boy,” she said in a shivering voice.

A softness came over Mr. Carpenter’s face long before Bess turned to confront the man, even as Mr. Carpenter watched her from behind.

“Bessy. Dear Bessy, I can’t just leave it. I have to do something. If I drop it altogether, my own kind won’t understand.”

Bess pulled Leon in front of her. She lifted his face toward Mr. Carpenter’s.

Leon knew he wasn’t to look Mr. Carpenter in the eye. But Bess held his face up. He tried to shift his eyes to the left, then to the right, but everywhere his eyes moved, there was the landowner’s face. So he closed his eyes.

“Look at him!” Bess yelled. “Take a look.”

“Don’t need to. I seen him before. Mona pointed him out a long time ago.”

“Mona don’t know you like I knows you.” Bess’s hand shook against Leon’s chest.

Fred then did something very uncharacteristic of everything Leon knew about white men. He closed the shack door and said, “Nobody knows what goes on here.”

Bess let Leon’s face go and turned him, then handed him to Martha.

Leon sat obediently.

Fred spoke in the quietest tones. “I whoop my boys pretty hard. Done it out of sadness. Little Earl, not knowing why I was doin’ it told the truth of it. They was playin’ hard like I told them not to and
pushed Freddy off a high brace. That’s what happened.” He paused and reached out to Bess who let him touch her neck with his hand.

Leon squirmed to get up, but Martha put light pressure on his legs, and he sat still.

Evening sunlight angled through an open window. The softness of the shadows reduced the scene to a fantasy. A fantasy Leon couldn’t quite grasp.

Leon let his mind stretch as far over the experience as he could. He tried to understand all the words and motions and their meanings. No matter how hard he tried though, he felt left out. The words didn’t say everything straight enough. And the actions confused him. He never saw a white man touch a black before. Not with such gentleness and compassion. Not without a strap between the two of them.

“If it were Mona, she’d have him gone,” Fred said.

“He ain’t the only boy here,” Bess said.

“There’s no need,” Fred said.

Bess was a thin and shapely woman from behind. Her face, Leon knew well, showed no worry, no pain, but showed no life either. Bess’s face was smooth as a young girl’s, which seemed unnatural. Leon watched as his mother lifted thin arms and held onto Mr. Carpenter’s forearms. “Ain’t Mona’s decision.”

“No, it ain’t.”

“She beat him plenty when he little.”

“I know,” he said.

Martha turned her head away as if she didn’t want to witness the two of them.

“Then let him be,” Bess said.

“Caint.” Mr. Carpenter pulled away and turned to face the door. “I got to mark him. If I don’t nobody’ll be happy. But, I promise you this, I’ll do it quick and easy as I can.”

“That yo’ decision?” Bess said.

He looked at her once again. “I decided that. And I decided he’s going to replace my boy. He’s going to do all Freddy’s chores and his own. I’ll tell Big Leon.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Leon whispered.

Fred looked over Bess’s shoulder at Leon. “This is good for you, boy. The best that could happen. There’s much worse. Most would’ve sold you long ago.”

“Still not right,” Leon whispered.

“Shush,” Bess said. “Don’t sass him.”

Betrayed, Leon lowered his head in silence.

Mr. Carpenter nodded to Bess, then to Martha. “Let’s go, boy.”

Big Leon opened the door. He gave Bess a stern look, and she backed away from Fred. “What you doin’ with the boy?”

Leon had made a step toward Mr. Carpenter and stopped when his father entered.

“Don’t you look at me,” Fred hollered.

Big Leon stared into the man’s face. “The boy?” he said. Big Leon’s arms shined with sweat. His thoroughly soiled shirt held tight to his toughened skin.

“I told the women folk. Now, don’t push me or I’ll be forced to do more.” Fred walked to Leon and grabbed his arm as if it were a fly bothering him.

Big Leon moved out of the doorway.

“You watch how you’re walking.” Fred said in the angriest voice Leon had heard since the landowner’s arrival.

Big Leon looked down and let Fred pass.

Leon led with Fred’s thin fingers laid across his shoulder, shoving him forward. Leon heard his father say, “Dammit woman, you always takin’ my strength from me. What I done for it?” The voices stopped after that one statement, but now Leon let it ring over and over inside his head as Fred, using one firm hand, guided Leon down the path and around the barn.

Behind the barn, Mr. Carpenter pulled his belt off and with the metal steer-shaped buckle slapped Leon across the face.

Leon fell to his knees and touched his bleeding cheek.

“Take off your shirt.”

Leon obeyed.

Mr. Carpenter hit him hard across each shoulder. Then he picked Leon up and made a quick scrape down his chest with a steer horn, opening the skin to the hot air.

“You a pale black, boy.”

Leon didn’t know whether to respond or not and stood quietly waiting for another blow.

“Your daddy love you?”

“He don’t say,” Leon answered.

“You work with him?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“He teach you the work?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And he don’t say you his boy? Back there, he called you the boy, like you not his. You know why?”

“No, Sir.”

Fred scraped the buckle across Leon’s chest again. “Sounds like you got the nigger brains, but not the nigger skin.” He shoved Leon. Shoved him hard. “Don’t know why I’m bein’ easy on you, except that your life must be hard enough. You can go home now. Be ready to work at sunup, boy. And wash up first. You stink and I don’t want that smell stickin’ to my boy who’s left.”

Leon walked into the shack, and Bess was already gone.

“Boy, you look a mess,” Martha said right off. “I clean you up.”

The sun was all but a sparkle from setting.

Martha lit two candle lanterns and wet and soaped a rag. “This goin to hurt, but not like yo’ beatin’.”

“Weren’t no beatin’.” Leon said. “More like a scrapin’ and a smackin’.”

“You lucky as much as you unlucky.”

“Why don’t Mr. Carpenter be upset at Freddy diein’?”

“He upset. He fightin’ with his own self. I seen it. Like the devil fightin’ with the Lord. Men folk always like that. They always fightin’ with demons. He have plenty a demons, that man do. He down right guilty. But thinkin’ about this evenin’ he sharin’ his guilt with this family.”

Martha prepared a dampened rag and ran it across Leon’s scrapes, first his cheek, then his chest.

Leon tightened at the sting. “He say I stink and to clean up.”

“You don’t stink. He just don’t like the smell of work. Or maybe the smell of truth.”

“I don’t mind smellin’ different.”

“You fine.” Martha said.

After a moment, while putting his shirt on, Leon asked, “Does Pa love me?”

Martha stopped fussing. She looked out the window for a moment. The light from a half moon flattened her face and put a shine in her eyes. Her teeth, too, shined when she spoke. Her lips quivered. “Yo’ Pa love you, boy. Yo’ Pa love everythin’. He love everybody. All except his-self. And that hard to get out of.”

Leon breathed. He had been holding his breath. His cheeks tightened near tears even though he didn’t know why. “I love Pa. I be proud he boss of some of the work. I be proud he look Sir in the eye. I love him ‘cause he my Pa. Just ‘cause.” The tears streamed down his face.

Martha took him to her breast. “Now, boy. You stay proud. You keep lovin’ yo’ Pa. No matter what you learn, Big Leon yo’ Pappy. You remember.”

“I don’t want extra chores. I don’t want to work with those white boys all the time. They try not to do nothin’.”

“I know. I know.” Martha rocked Leon while they stood there.

That night Big Leon didn’t come in until very late. Later than usual.

Bess had returned to the shack and Leon lay on the floor with her, his muscles so tense they hurt. He lay naked after being washed. Bess ran her fingers absentmindedly up and down Leon’s body from knees to neck and touching everything between.

The cool night air blew into the shack, shocking Leon at first. Then he rose from beside Bess and walked to his own corner. His body relaxed instantly. He slipped on his shirt. In slow silence, Leon reached and touched his father’s hand briefly before going over to lie on his own straw bed.

Big Leon pulled a tattered blanket up and around Leon’s shoulders. Then with his big hand, he patted Leon on the back and brushed his face where it had been cut. He slid a vegetable crate to the back door and stared into the black woods.

I
n the fall of his twelfth year, the air deep with winter urgings and blowing at him through the barn door, Leon busily mucked stalls and transferred feed barrels. By his side were Hank and Earl, who were alternately cruel and kind to Leon, one moment ordering him around, the next asking how Leon thought they should fix the barn door. Leon settled into his position as half slave and half older-brother. His weak stomach had him throwing up once a week, mostly late in the evenings and well after dinner, after being tickled or played with by Poor Bess.

After spending the morning to early afternoon with the Carpenter boys, Leon worked in the fields with Big Leon. One day Leon reached for Big Leon’s hand, but the hand was pulled away and Leon didn’t try again for years.

By this time Leon had learned why the other Negro children called him Mix-up. He learned that he could be an instrument of cruelty in his own family. And he learned that Hank and Earl’s sister, Hillary, grew older, just as he did, but that she blossomed differently.

Mona had kept Hillary away from the help for years. By the time Hillary turned twelve, though, Leon had not only been introduced to her, but also saw her often while cleaning the garbage from behind the house or whenever she strolled out to the barn to call for Hank and Earl.

Although stout like her mother, Hillary’s face didn’t carry the same weight of anger and cruelty that Mona’s face displayed. Not that Leon saw Mona’s face often. He tried to stay away when she was around. She’d holler and threaten to beat him.

Hillary was talkative and curious at the same time. Sometimes she’d ask Leon a question, then suggest three answers even before he could think what to say. He learned to think faster and it became a game for him to come up with an answer before she could.

Hillary slipped through the barn door. All the boys stopped working at the same time.