Wash (17 page)

He doesn’t know the word the crewmen keep using for him but he figures it out soon enough because they use it every time they catch him fingering metalwork, whether it’s the fittings on the boat or the chains holding him. He runs his fingers over the hammered metal, picturing which blow where, in what order and how many. Partly to distract himself and partly to feed the picture of himself he’s trying to hold on to in his mind. That picture of himself as a strong useful man with a life and a calling, plenty of chickens, tobacco and pumpkins brought to him in payment for his work.

He is careful to stop his mind before it gets to his wife and the new baby boy who finally came after years of waiting and prayers, before it gets to those catchermen rising up in the midst of his chants. He stops because his neck is still torn up from his last struggle. He was not trying to hurt himself or break free. Nothing is that clear. All he knows is that letting those particular pictures into his mind makes him feel like he’s dreaming a nightmare where the ground keeps disappearing from under him until he’s falling backwards toward some sort of unknown jaggedness and can’t keep himself from thrashing.

They set him apart from the others but he has no idea why. All he knows is he has never let himself be used by anybody except for the spirits and he won’t start now that he’s lost everything else. He clamps his mouth shut. His belly growls and his mouth waters but he refuses food. He does not know where his ancestors are or why they have forsaken him, but he will not let it be said that he turned his back on them by continuing to live even as he is being dragged away from them.

His grandfather always told him this world we live in is merely the marketplace we visit, while the other world where the ancestors live is home. This life we can touch with our fingertips is only the smallest part of the whole. Rufus feels himself small and pulled onto his grandfather’s bony lap. There is much more, the old man would say with longing and excitement in his clouded eyes.

During his own initiation, Rufus learned how right his grandfather had been. It was during those weeks of ritual when Rufus saw for himself how thin the skin is that divides this world from the next, and how easy it can be to move between the two. When he traveled to and through the spirit world, he saw, in strands of glowing light, his connections to all those living in this world, to all those not yet born and to all those dead but not gone. He saw each of us, along with every creature and tree, every stone and river, strung like beads throughout a web both delicate and durable, vast beyond imagining, stretching backward to the beginning of time and forward to its end.

This knowing has always freed Rufus from fear. Until now. He tries to tell himself this ship is only the smallest part of that bigger whole but the farther he is taken from what he knows, the less sure he becomes. It is not that he wants to die. It is not that simple. It is more that he wants to step back through the skin between the worlds before it’s too late.

After several weeks, Rufus’s bones rise beneath the surface of his no longer shiny skin, pulling its ashy grayness taut in the dim light. The captain orders Rufus brought to his cabin. Fifteen hundred dollars is a great deal of money and he is counting on it. Rufus appears in the narrow doorway, pushed from behind until he stumbles and almost falls. Deep shadows fill the hollows of his cheeks and collarbones. His thick muscles have thinned to wiry cords which cross his bony chest like ropes. The expression on his broad face is so inward as to seem blank. The biggest of the crewmen stands behind Rufus holding a chisel and a hammer.

“Can’t get his mouth open.”

“I don’t want you breaking any teeth. This one is my ticket.”

The captain surprises himself by dismissing the burly crewman without having him chain Rufus to the hook in the wall of his cabin. As he ushers the crewman out and shuts the door behind him, he mutters you’re starting to look like a shipwreck yourself as he pulls back a chair for Rufus across the table from his own.

Rufus stares at the smooth golden seat of the wooden chair then back at the captain. There is a chain running down his back from the collar around his neck. It circles his waist where his shackled hands are clipped to it then continues to the shackles at his ankles. This chain rattles against the buttery wood as Rufus sits, shifting to the side to avoid resting on the chain. He holds himself erect as he scans the cabin then locks his eyes onto a jagged scratch on the wooden floor, determined to block out what he has just seen.

The cabin is small and dark but the flickering light licks the treasures brightly enough for Rufus to recognize them. Iron staffs topped by sacred ritual objects. Forged by smiths for use in ceremony. Then sold or bartered, or worse, given to this white man. In appreciation for his business.

Rufus saw the two birds before he managed to look away and they hover in his peripheral vision still. Flanking him. The undersides of their outstretched wings catch the light of the captain’s gas lanterns and Rufus feels the man watching him. He wonders how those birds can possibly help him now.

The captain tugs on a rope hanging from the wall. Soon there’s a knock at the door. Cook hurries in to set a steaming plate in front of the captain. He pulls a knife, fork and glass from pockets in his apron, setting them one by one on the far edge of the table from Rufus, refusing to look at him sitting there, naked and filthy despite the bucket of cold salt water the crewmen had thrown over him before bringing him here. Cook pours a slug of golden rum into the glass from a bottle on the captain’s shelf and leaves without asking if that is everything.

The meal is not fancy but the steam rising from it fills the small cabin with the warm round smell of potatoes and the salty bite of bacon fat. The candlelight catches the golden liquid in the glass, which tilts a little with the roll of the boat, and Rufus feels his mouth water.

The captain says nothing. He nods at Rufus and digs into his dinner. As he chews, he runs his eyes over nautical charts on the table next to his plate, stopping every now and then to lift the glass to his mouth. Rufus can feel the warm tongue of liquor unfurling down his own throat. He clamps his lips together, thinking of his father and uncles gathering to talk. How they spill that first sip as a libation for the ancestors, then watch the dry ground soak up the spirits before anybody says a word.

After the captain has pushed the last of his dinner onto his fork with his knife, after he has run the heel of his bread around the smooth circle of his plate for the last of the gravy, then topped it off with the last sip of his drink, he reaches to pull the rope again. When Cook comes back to clear, the captain tilts his head toward Rufus, saying call Pinson to get him settled for the night.

After a few days of this, the captain pushes his plate across the table until it sits right in front of Rufus who stares at the far edge of the floor so he won’t see the birds. He steadies his mind by running his fingers across a link in his chain, feeling for hammer marks. The plate cools untouched and shadows fall deeper into the hollows between his bones. The captain takes the plate back, eats his dinner cold and feels Rufus slipping through his fingers.

The next night, the captain rises and comes around the table. He sets his plate down in front of Rufus and raises one finger to signal he will unshackle one hand for him to eat with. Pointing first to the left and then to the right. Which will it be?

Rufus looks at him for a long time. Fans out the fingers of his right hand as if he’s just stretching them. The captain nods and bends to unlock that one shackle. He picks up a thin piece of balsa wood from his desk, no wider than two fingers and no longer than his hand. He sets this harmless utensil next to his plate on Rufus’s side of the table and then sits back down in his chair to wait.

Rufus resists the urge to rotate his freed wrist because he does not want the captain to see how good it feels. He lets his fingers close lightly on the balsa wood, trying not to grab it so hard that it breaks but unsure of his muscles after so long. The steam and smell of the food rise into his face, his mouth waters and his stomach curls inside him like a fist.

They sit across from one another for what feels like a long time until the captain reaches into a shelf under his desk for a second glass then leans across the table to set it in front of Rufus. He reaches forward to pour a slug of golden rum into it. Then he lifts his own glass and tilts it toward Rufus, looking dead at him.

With that salute, something inside Rufus gives. The wall he has built between himself and the fact of those birds tilts and falls as he turns his mind to face whatever new life might be coming toward him. He scoops a bite of mashed potatoes onto the tip of the balsa wood, the gravy having cut a brown delta through the pale. Lifts it to his mouth. As his lips close around that soft savory bite, the captain smiles.

Once Rufus begins to eat, always with the captain, always with that slug of rum in his own cup, he starts looking like a man breathing in and filling up instead of a man sighing out and collapsing. Their shared ritual is their mutual secret. Both crew and cargo would be enraged. Too many lines being crossed. Cook stays quiet on account of all the captain has on him. He knows if he opens his mouth, he’ll be stepping off right then and there. The strength of the captain’s reputation for breaking Africans, for cracking even the toughest nuts, depends on secrecy.

All the captain will say when he tells this story later is that he scanned Rufus until he found the one kindness that hooked him, then granted him that one kindness over and over. Used that soft spot to drag Rufus back to the surface of this strange new world. The captain believes it is this one carefully chosen kindness, the lift and tilt of a shared glass held in the one freed hand, burning like a star in the midst of the degradation, that finally brings Rufus to heel.

And the captain is partly right. But the birds came first. It was seeing those sacred birds atop their ceremonial staffs, leaning toward the corner of this captain’s cabin, that knocked Rufus loose from the only world he knew. Once he stood separate and alone, the toast tipped him the rest of the way. Served as some kind of witness. And these evenings with the captain do suggest to Rufus that all is not lost, that there might be some way to navigate this new life. Even as he wonders whether he can use this special treatment to unseat the captain, he knows his lot is well in with the man by now.

What Rufus does not realize is that the captain reads each of these thoughts as they cross his mind, no matter how closed he keeps his expression. The captain knows exactly how seeing the birds will affect Rufus. That’s why he has them on his wall. He has years of experience trading with the kings along this coast before their power started to fade. Negotiations had stretched out over days, forging relationships as well as understandings, teaching him to appreciate the complexity of his opponents.

So the captain has been reading Rufus rather than those nautical charts all along. He recognizes the calm arrogance of superiority Rufus can never quite hide and decides to grant him that rather than try to beat it out of him. He will say Rufus has royal blood because this will raise the price. Only a fool tries to buy royalty, but since they are fools, they won’t see the trouble there. Africa remains a mystery to those men crowding the markets in Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans. Since that fact works to his advantage, the captain plans to keep it that way.

He will tell these buyers whatever he feels like telling them and they’ll be glad to hear it, cherishing those nuggets of information, correct or not, because everybody wants life to come wrapped in a story. Most people prefer a good story over one that’s accurate so he plans to oblige.

The captain has learned a few phrases from various kings which he enjoys trying out on Rufus. His favorite expression happens to be in a language close enough for Rufus to grasp its meaning. When he has to sit and listen to this captain tell him that it comes down to knowing how much you can afford, Rufus finds himself starting to agree.

∞

Wash

Rufus was West African, like my mamma and me, but not from the same stretch of coast. From what I heard people say, they doublecrossed him. He was sold by his own. And he acted up pretty bad coming across so he got seasoned hard.

What he told me was, once he decided to live, it was just one thing after the next. And he’s got sense enough to know a sweet spot when he finds it. Said he hadn’t been on the Thompson place more than a day when he first saw Cleo and that was that.

And he knew those boys were pushing them over the broom for the children they’d have but he didn’t let that ruin it. Said he’d find some kind of way. Might even buy em both with the money he made from forging at night.

Rufus and my mamma and me, we all looked alike, but that don’t mean we got treated the same. So far as Rufus was concerned, he was quality and they needed to show they knew how to handle him. His coming to those boys as a special order from their daddy, his being the last present they ever got from the old man, gave Rufus some leverage. He said they had to learn to treat him right so they could show him off good.

But I was a whole different story. The way their daddy treated my mamma and me out on that island for all those years burned those boys right up. Running buck wild was what they called it. Said I was nothing but green broke and spoiled.

What Rufus said about it was if you can’t ride a green horse and you need to beat it to make it do right, that’s you being a man. But if you can’t ride a well broke horse without having to beat it, that’s just you being worthless.