Walk Through Darkness (8 page)

William’s mother had told him the story of his birth many times. It became his first memory, an event he relived over and over again through her perspective. Until he was old enough to refuse, Nan would lie with him in bed, arms close around him, her long, black hair tickling his shoulders and neck. Although the palms of her hands were as rough as any field laborer’s, the skin along the undersides of her arms was of a softness he would never forget. She spoke quietly, telling him what it was like to have had him within her, to have felt him moving against her from the inside. Some women, she said, gave birth right in the
fields, labored as they labored, only pausing long enough to push the child out of their body. “I’s too soft for that, baby. You hurt me something crazy. Took hours to get you out.” She remembered every minute of those hours, the way the pain gripped her, the way the crown of his head pushed her open, wide, wide like she had never been before, and never would be again. She said that she dreamed of being in labor years afterward, and she always began those dreams in fear. Who or what was this creature within her? It could’ve been anything, so unnatural seemed the pain of its coming. “But,” she said, “them dreams never turned bad. Every time it’s just you. Every time I see you come up out of me I know it could only ever be you. You a gift from your daddy to me.”

He was sure that no other boy-child had ever been told such things by his mother. It embarrassed him even before he understood why. But she often embarrassed him with her love, and confused him with the righteous complexity of her thoughts. To his young mind she seemed to be a swirl of contradictions. One moment she spoke of the bonds between loved ones as all-important; the next she demanded self-reliance in his every act and deed. One morning she would preach acceptance of their position as slaves; and yet by the evening she might become a fount of verbal disobedience. She sometimes found beauty in the work of her hands, in the splendor of nature, in the sunset-light waving across the fields. Other times she punished her fingers for giving their gifts up for other people’s pleasure, crushed flowers with her bare feet, tossed up curses to the power that spread such rarified light across a land so filled with grief.

The evening after his interview with Howard Mason, Nan returned from work and called William to her. She took him by the hand and walked with him back to the strange structure they lived in, a shack built around the base of a tree just beyond slave row. She sat him down, took the apple from his hand and set a piece of corn bread before him. She asked what Mason had
said. William repeated the man’s words as best he could, jumbling the biblical lore completely, but honing in on the substance of the man’s point.

“And whatchu think of all that mess?”

“Dunno,” the boy said. As his mother was silent, he added, “Had him a Bible he read from.”

“A Bible, huh? That’s just a book writ down by some white men to explain themselves to themselves. Don’t be fool enough to study on no Bible. I’ll show you what to study on.”

She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him through the woods. She led him around the far corner of slave row, within a stone’s throw of Fishing Creek, through the grove of stunted cherry trees, and on to the plot of land reserved for the Negro dead. It was an area no different than other wooded patches, but to William’s eyes the place was one of unnatural threat. To him, the trees seemed particularly gnarled. They twisted into shapes that were nearly human. The boughs above cast a thicker darkness, and the tall grasses caressed his legs. He knew the lore of this place as well as any child, the tales of headless beings, of angry slaves walking the earth undead at certain hours of the night, of spirits called forth by the living to wreak havoc on their enemies.

“You see this here?” she asked, pointing at the spot that William knew to be his father’s grave. “This here your daddy. He in the ground just here, in the nigger plot. But he wasn’t no nigger, was he? What was he?”

William’s gaze touched on his father’s weathered cross, a bone-white thing that seemed to be fashioned of the same material as the skeletal remains it marked. He stared at it like he was watching it for the minutest movement, searching for signs that the being buried below it was stirring. He dreamed of just such things sometimes. The earth peeled back on itself and up rose a gaunt, worm-eaten person, ivory-skinned and glowing in the night. He called William’s name and labeled him as kin and demanded
some blood penance of him, a ritual never completed but which began when the man’s fingernails pierced the skin of his wrists and began to peel the flesh away.

“What was he?” his mother asked again.

“White man,” he said.

“That’s right. He was a white man. What’s he doing buried with all these slaves then?”

William didn’t answer. He knew that she was about to tell him whether he answered or not.

“He here cause he was a good man,” she said. “Cause he loved me like a wife and you like a son. He wasn’t afraid of that love. Had his own mind and spoke it. If you got a true mind in you, you don’t need to read from some old dead men’s words. You speak up with your own mouth and speak what you see and what you know from looking at the world around you. You hear?”

Nan knelt down beside him. She took both of his hands in hers and forced him to look up at her. Her skin was just a shade darker than chestnut; her eyes cast of the same color and quality. There was a fullness to her features—a pout to her lips, a roundness to her high cheekbones. Her face, before her son’s, had been tempered by a clash of cultures. She told him, as she had done many times before, that his father had been a good man. He had seen the world with clear eyes. He had loved and been good to her and had abandoned the privileges of his race to luxuriate in that love. He was a foreigner, yes, but this was a country being built by foreigners. He had come here poor as any slave, but he had chosen her over his own prosperity, had found a greater reason for living and had so produced him, William. If he had lived their lives would have been different. She wouldn’t have had to tell him these things because he would’ve seen his father and known him with his own eyes. That’s the first and main thing she wished she could change about the past.

“But there ain’t no curse on you, at least not a curse put on by God,” she said. “You got good blood in you, boy. Never disbelieve it. The blood of a man what loved you before you were born. Got good blood, on your father’s side and on mine. Look at me … Ain’t I beautiful? Ain’t you proud I’m your momma? Tell me, you proud of me?”

William fixed his eyes on her collarbone. He wasn’t scared anymore. He wasn’t thinking about ghosts or spirits or death. His mother’s question replaced those things. He wanted to pull his hands from her grasp and step back, for the air close to her was hard to breathe, as if she were sucking it all in and away from him. But even as he thought this his view of her collarbone went blurry. His eyes flushed red and his bottom lip began to tremble, alive with an emotion he hadn’t known he had within him. One second he wanted to run from her; the next he knew that he would never, never do that. She was everything that he had ever been, ever needed or loved or ever would, and of course he was proud of her. “Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Momma …” He tried to hide his face against her neck, but she wouldn’t let him.

“Tell me, yeah what?”

“Yeah, I proud.”

Nan tilted the boy’s face up toward hers. Tears tumbled from his eyes and streaked his cheeks. She studied him for a moment, then pulled him to her. He never forgot the things she said, nor the feel of her arms around him, nor the smell of her skin. He didn’t doubt that she loved him or that she was something special or that she had lessons to teach. But at a base level behind all of that, he did doubt her story of his father. There never was such a man. There never could be such a man. No man he had ever known was so created. He knew the truth. His father was a ghoul, and Nan was only trying to shelter him from the shame of it.

E
IGHT
From the slave quarters the hound followed the trail with little difficulty. Her great canine nose snuffed up the faintest traces of scent from leaf matter, ground or even out of hollowed depressions filled only with still air. She ran through the marshlands eager and loud. She darted through reeds and across boggy ground and through woodlands bordered by farms. She was nearly distracted more than once. But, ever mindful of her position, she kept her nose down and tried to ignore the signs of other sport, markings of other canines, smells of as-yet-untried victuals. For his part, Morrison trudged along at a wolf-run, walking at times and jogging at times and kicking up into a run when his body allowed.

In the evenings the two sat beside the tiniest of fires and shared out their food and ate like equals. This land brought back memories that the man did not care for, bits and pieces of his first days on this continent and the hardships that time had brought. And his thoughts sometimes went even further back, all the way to the land of his birth. He had been born in northern Scotland in the early years of the nineteenth century. In his youth he had a family about him that he loved dearly. A younger brother like a shadow behind him, a wee sister who tottered on her pins, a mother grown gaunt by her troubles, and a father who slept sitting up and breathed loud in the night, whom he adored with an unreasoning affection. Theirs was a hard life as tenant farmers in a land of stony soil, a country of wind and of rain that came sideways like a stampede. They were chilled in the summer and cold in the changing of seasons and near frozen in the winter. But for all that it was a beautiful land, a tragic country that bore the scars of men’s sins across its flesh, peopled by a spirited race that he seldom had reason to be ashamed of.

In his fourteenth year the landowner compared the profits offered him
by his tenants with the profits offered by filling the land with sheep. The four-legged creatures paid far better, and such simple arithmetic was all he needed to turn his mind. Men came upon the family one morning, armed and angry and quick in their work. They set the house to torch and pushed them out with the things they could carry. It was as simple as that. After that, they worked where they could, lived how they could. They farmed a sorry plot, a rutted and sandy landscape that provided never a flat spot, but instead torqued and pitched at ever more bizarre angles, the purpose of which seemed only to crash down into the sea in new and unusual ways. Morrison and his brother fished straight from the cliffs and climbed the crags in search of bird eggs and even waded in the pools prying limpets from the cold rocks. But they never ate enough, never slept enough, and the wee girl’s nose never stopped running. It ran so steady and undisturbed that her upper lip grew painful to the touch. One morning they awoke to find her cold and calm and finally forgiven. In the weeks of mourning after this, the father too gave in. The mother and her two boys made their way to Aberdeen and collapsed there amongst the granite foundations of the place. The mother became a gaunt wraith of a woman, a simple, pale sheet of skin thrown over her bones. She got what work she could gutting herring, but it was no use. She had no spirit within her anymore. Eventually, she too lay down and did not rise except for the exertions of the two remaining sons, who carried her away and saw her into the ground themselves.

In their days alone in Aberdeen the two brothers had been all and everything for each other, for in that place there was little of the kinship they’d known in their youth. It was a fight for survival, each to his own, one man pitted against the next. This was a lesson the boys learned quickly. They awoke each morning as if they had shared the same dreams. They labored each day at the same work, wore the same clothes as if each item was held in trust between them, and they ate together from the same bowl in the evenings, trying with their loud slurping to make the food more than it was. At night they slept one entwined around the other, finding in this lover’s embrace just enough warmth to see them through to the next day. And it was there in that tiny room that the two brothers devised their plan and set about to see it made real.

In Morrison’s twenty-fifth year the two brothers earned the money for their fares. He was no longer a boy. He was a man and had seen things to make him old beyond his years. When he quit the land of his birth he did so with a bitter heart. He asked God to damn the place, for the sea to swallow it, and for each and every landowner to choke on his own bile. They journeyed afoot to Greenock and boarded an ancient ship so frail it had to be bound together with a great chain that ran from the deck under the hull and back again. It was not meant for human cargo. It had made the eastbound journey from America loaded with lumber. And as she made the crossing afloat they decided to up the wager and sail her back. But there was no wood to head that direction. Neither could it be tea or cloth or spices, as the hull of the ship was awash with water and so valuable a cargo would be sorely missed if it went to the bottom of the sea. So they sailed north and loaded her full of a coarser freight, the teuchter, the Highland Scot, for if they were to perish who would mourn whom wasn’t already in mourning?

When the ship first floated free of the dock it groaned and protested. The vessel left behind all memory of land and climbed through a range of waves and troughs. Morrison tried to rock back and forth with the ship’s movements. For the first hours, he thought he had found the rhythm of it, but then discovered that he was working against it. He moved this way, while the ship moved that. And when he tried to find reason in the thing and change his time he found that there was no time. There was no reason. That was the trick of it. And so the sickness began. It was a new sound in the darkness—the retching, the coughing and the moaning. Filth dripped from the chins around him. It fell heavy on the boards, rushed upon his nostrils and sent him heaving like the rest. And these were not the only trials on that ship. There was the hunger. There was the pickpocket who rooted in the younger brother’s jacket with little care because he deemed him already dead. There were the lice that swarmed across them and the rats that stayed hidden until the passengers had no strength to beat them away. And there was the catalogue of the dead, those who went into the sea with prayers carried away on the waves.

Seven weeks after beginning their journey they laid eyes upon the
coastline of America. But in truth, they never reached their true destination, the Cape Fear of North Carolina, the place to which many of their Gaelic-speaking kinsmen had preceded them. Instead, they were put ashore in a quiet cove of the Chesapeake. The hatch opened and they were summoned up at musket-point and put to land along the quiet, wooded shore. The two brothers stood on the beach with the others, some thirty-five of them, watching the long boat row back out to the ship. They were left with no explanation, no provisions, no directions. They knew only that it was American soil beneath their feet, and that the great bay before them bore a name none of them could yet pronounce.

Of that original group only twenty found their way to the settlements. The rest dropped off along the way of one fever or another, from hunger and fatigue, weakened by relentless mosquito attacks, skin blistered by the southern sun. The two brothers dragged each other through the marshland. They pushed through reeds and walked over ground so boggy that they sank into it with each step. They spent the nights sitting back-to-back, looking up at the stars and trying, through their own conversation, to drown out the din of unknown insects. Through much of the trek the younger brother wept. Morrison wrapped his arm around him and propped him up and the two took some measure of strength from each other. And it was in this way—connected at the shoulders—that they returned to the world of the living. They saw one fisherman sail past at a distance on the water, and then another tacking into the wind. Then a farmer and his dog rose up from the landscape as if they’d just climbed out of the earth itself. They stared at the newcomers with all the wonder they might have shown at the Second Coming. This was how the two brothers arrived in this country and laid eyes on their first friendly face. It was quite a memory, one that hadn’t dimmed with the passing years, one that the tracker was daily amazed to discover anew.

As they continued the hunt, Morrison and the hound circumnavigated Baltimore, moved away from the Bay and up into a hilly country cut into plots of woodland and farm and occasional towns. They followed
the fugitive’s scent through a range of pine forests and down onto a road and along it for a good distance. Around noon a couple weeks into their search Morrison bounded up behind the hound, who had stopped still in the middle of two deep wagon ruts. The canine stood dejected and ashamed, and the man knew that she had lost the scent.