Wash (28 page)

The prayer ends and the conversation starts back up, bouncing harsh and jerky as it veers both toward and away from the one thing no one is supposed to mention. Lucius looks into his father’s eyes as he is asked about his Latin lesson and all he can feel is the impossibility of conveying to him the wide sweep of the horizon from that high rocky bluff overlooking the river, the smoothness of the small furred bodies he and Wash collect from the traps, the steady quiet rhythm of Wash’s hands building a fire then skinning a squirrel. Humming over it as it cooks. The tenderness of those small juicy chunks of meat, crisp to burnt at the edges. Lucius holds worlds within him that his family does not share and he must wait for all that life to subside before he trusts himself to speak. He watches his father growing impatient with him but he can’t find any words the old man wants to hear.

“Did Nero get in a fight with you?”

Richardson looks down the table at his gathered family. He feels the rest of their unasked questions hovering close, full of that exact mix of eagerness dancing over fear that he hears in his hounds’ voices when they have cornered a bear. As Lucius starts to break the silence with a second question, Richardson tackles the thing directly only to get it over with sooner.

He tells them that they are not to worry. There will be an inquiry which will settle the case for good since he has plenty of eyewitnesses. Most of his people. Too many of them in fact. He tells his family with a harsh bark of a laugh that he might even get his money back since Nero hadn’t been here three months.

Lucius remains puzzled, his perpetually raised eyebrows hovering high under his dark widow’s peak, but as soon as he opens his mouth, Richardson snaps at him to close it. Hurt rises in the boy’s eyes but his father doesn’t care. As long as it keeps that mouth of his shut for tonight. Richardson stows the whole story away and drags the conversation back into safer waters, grateful to his wife for leading their children through planning Mary Patton’s upcoming birthday party.

All he can feel is the smooth sturdiness of the wall he has already built between himself and the incident. He does not turn toward it again until everyone has gone to bed and he is finally alone in his study, drink in hand, diary open. Time to make sense of the day.

He can feel himself slowing as he draws closer to Nero but he takes great comfort in the detailed texture of his list of small things accomplished.
Filled yesterday’s orders, sent two wagonloads of nails down to the dock, placed orders for seven harnesses and extra bits to replace those sold last week
.

He writes his way toward Nero but he feels himself pull up short. When he gets to the point where nothing else happened before Nero stepped up in his face and wrapped his hands around his neck, when he gets to the part where everything grew unbearably bright, blowing out to white before darkness started to seep in due to lack of oxygen, when he gets to the part about the feel of his knife setting its shoulder to the wall of Nero’s low belly until it finally broke through, bringing with it a weakening of Nero’s grip, then the darkness rolling back as he sucked in a deep breath and the world returned from blown out white to its usual vibrancy, when he gets to Nero’s sudden gracelessness, falling slack and dull at his feet, when he gets to all that, he wonders how to tell it.

The weight of the glass in his palm is all that anchors him as feelings surge inside him, raising the hair on his forearms. He cannot avoid knowing that a part of him finds what happened this morning thrilling, the exhilaration of feeling his own strength, saving his own life. As he waits for these feelings to settle into some kind of clarity, all they do is flutter inside his chest. He downs more bourbon trying to still them but it doesn’t work.

He looks at the quill pen in his hand and his fingers smeared with ink. Pulls aside the blotter sheet he uses under his writing hand so as not to smear the neatness of his record. The last line reads
settlers keep buying bits at double the price. Remind Cassius to bring more back with him from Singleton in New Orleans
. After that last line, the golden straw color of the page spills open into blankness.

Richardson wants to tell these days. Lay his life across those empty pages. Record this event like he records everything else. He knows readers will come along later, wondering. But he knows just as surely that his answers will never add up. They’ll be stretched taut as a tanning hide over the vast confusion of this time he’s living through. No matter what words he finds for what’s happening to him, he knows his truth will never reach these readers. Not without Nero’s hands around their necks. But he wants to write it down, whether it creates any clarity or not, if only so he can leave it here. Close it up in this book and then walk out into some new day clearer and more manageable than this one.

He dips his pen in the ink and brings it to the page but he pauses there for so long the ink beads up and rolls off the nib to land in a tiny juicy globe. Dark rich brown hovering against the pale expanse. Richardson curses as he tries to blot it but in his haste, he makes a deep spreading stain which fills the space of all the words he could have used.

In the end he writes
Sent the new negro Nero away for burial
.

He reminds himself to put someone his people trust in charge of the burial so they won’t get wound up from worrying about him selling the body to the new medical school over in Knoxville. Since stories get passed from hand to mouth until they are forged into something stronger and more alluring than facts, whatever few facts there are can act like kerosene on a hay fire.

The sky outside the window pales from black to deep purple and the birds start to stir. There is too much to keep track of and no rest for the weary, Richardson thinks, as he pushes back his chair and heads down to the kitchen for some of Emmaline’s coffee before everyone else is up.

Richardson

I’m not sure what I thought about Nero. I’m not sure what I thought about any of it. What I know is that I took one step and then the next. Each step I took ruled out the one I did not take. Wiped it clean off the slate and there was no going back.

But I also know I never could see clearly from where I was standing. It was all a mist and I kept stepping forward into it, trying to see through to the other side. Then that became the road I went down.

I’m not certain about choosing. There are so many parts I would not have chosen. Most in fact. It seems a waste of time and breath to lay out the ones I very much regret, separate and distinct from the ones I only partially regret. What good will that do?

We knew what was happening from the very beginning. We saw the snag, fighting to free ourselves from slavery to England while continually hitching negroes to our wagons. I was young and flush with my own power but I caught glimpses even then, thanks to Virgil and Albert. Those first two men I hadn’t wanted to buy showed me everything I didn’t want to see.

You can’t work alongside a man all day, raising the roof of your house, and not know what he’s made of. Certainly, there were some whose eyes were dull and flat as fish, too beaten down or confused or plain simpleminded to lay claim to much of anything. But there were always those few who looked at you in such a way that you knew you were seeing another human soul in those eyes. Those few rendered knowing inescapable.

I’d bought Virgil and Albert for that look in their eye, and Nero and Mena too for that matter, whether I should have or not, and they were full of thoughts of their own. There were plenty of moments when the veil between us thinned and I could see right through it. It was these moments you tried to shake loose from your mind and forget about, because it could confuse you when you looked in there and saw somebody.

Didn’t happen very often. Most of them learned to close their faces right up. It took them a while, and some growing up, but they’d get to where they’d do it before you had a chance to see much.

It was the little ones who had not yet learned how to make themselves unavailable. They’d stare right at you, open as a flower. And I have to say, it felt good, even if it was unsettling, looking into a pair of negro eyes that weren’t slammed shut like a good strong door.

I always had the sense some few other men out here felt as I did. Not that anyone had articulated it or ever would. Just that there were times, near the end of a gathering, when this room full of men standing around smoking and drinking would fall silent. So quiet and still, with the blue of our smoke muscling through the lamplight as slow and sure as a big king snake. And whenever the fire crackled unexpectedly and quite loud, not one of us even flinched.

It was as if we felt, at some very basic level, beyond calamity. Those of us who were honest surely knew that our work and our lives had carried us far beyond the bosom of any family, and we knew just as surely that there was nothing for it. We built a dam and spent our days watching for seep. Forever writing laws designed to patch things up. But there are laws and there are people and between them there will always lie a gap.

I often thought the only thing that gave us strength was the simple fact that there was no other way to be. I never did understand those who tried to soften the blow. What was the point of that?

We all knew the arrangement and we were each set on our respective course. The die was cast. Emmaline knew the truth of this as well as I did, whether she would ever admit it or not.

Part Four

High summer, 1819

Pallas

Just from them telling me about Wash, I knew what the problem was right away. All that putting him on other folks’ people, he’s bound to pick up something and this one was bad.

Thick set, bandy legged man named Quinn stops by Miller’s place, looking for me. He steps right inside my cabin and starts talking. Telling me what the man’s privates look like and how he won’t heal. How he and Richardson need this trouble sorted out because they’ve got dates booked. Commitments to meet. Says they are losing money every day this thing drags on.

I’m looking at the floor to keep anything from showing on my face. I’m thinking of that first time I saw Wash. How he was sitting in that stall where they kept him. How he ran his eyes over me like all I was was parts, just his road to get somewhere, and no me there anywhere.

I was tempted to leave him to wallow in it or else give him something I knew wouldn’t work. But Phoebe always warned me be careful. Told me doing like that would come back around and slap me in the face, even with white folks. She kept telling me let God decide. Said God takes care of most things. If not now, then later. Take this medicine just as far as you feel guided and don’t go no further. No matter what.

Once Quinn started in again, I heard Phoebe saying we got to look out for each other because Lord knows, nobody else will. I started to collect my things and told the man to go on home, I’d be there by late afternoon. That would have to be soon enough because I had some gathering to do.

Soon as he left, I went down by the creek and pulled bunches of prickly ash. Boil the bark for a tea with some left over for Wash to chew. Give him a new stinging to take his mind off that other burning. I had some bloodroot from when I last collected with Phoebe. I can still see her showing me how that thick veined leaf wraps right around its flower standing so straight, like a woman wearing a cape.

As I came back around the side of the hill, there was a patch of goldenseal growing knee high. Same kind of root with a strong dye but yellow. I always kept some of both those roots with me. Ever since Phoebe used that same red and yellow on me when she was bringing me back into this world, they stayed two of my steadies.

I figured I’d have a fever to break so I found some pale pink rocket flowers growing tall by the roadside on my way home. Grabbed hold down low and took the whole thing since greens can’t do nothing but help.

I made it to Richardson’s right at suppertime, handing the reins to Ben, knowing he’d get my horse cooled down good before letting him eat anything. They took me to the cabin where they had put Wash. I paused with my hand on the latch to pull myself together before I swung the door open.

Once I got inside, I couldn’t see how I’d been thinking of not bringing him some relief. He was sunk way down into the middle of himself, like he was trying to curl his spirit around him, even though he was laying flat out on his back. Wouldn’t look at me.