Wash (31 page)

Most everybody else had people. Phoebe took me under her wing but she had a bunch of her own to see about first. Grands and great grands. When second thought came to her, she’d scuttle over and grab me from the yard to pull me inside her cabin, or else tell one of her bigger boys to run quick and fetch me.

In those skinny minutes, I knew Phoebe felt bad because it was the only time she wouldn’t let me look in her eyes. Phoebe and I could talk without talking and that’s when I knew she was saying child, please just hang on and let somebody else help you because right now, I ain’t got enough to go around. It killed Phoebe to get to her end point. It didn’t happen too often but it did happen and it scared me as much as it scared her. That was when I could feel how I wasn’t hooked to nobody. Felt like I was falling even though I was standing on the ground.

A part of me wanted to say, go ahead and storm, white man, whatever the hell you are, danger, you go ahead and sweep me up. Maybe you’ll carry me to where I can find my own place because I’m sick and tired of being second thought. I wanted to be right smack in the middle of everything for once, with somebody reaching out for me first.

Well, Lord let me tell you, you best be careful what you ask for because sure enough you will get it.

Phoebe tried to tell me and she tried to tell me but I had to catch those eyes. Make em see the light moving on my pretty skin. Make em see my good hair falling all the way down my back. Make em see the spirit moving in me. Like if they didn’t see it and reach out for it, then it wasn’t there. I had to hook those eyes, make em ask who is that girl so I could say I am.

I had no idea how quick who is that girl turns into I want me some of that girl. But I sure did learn.

When Drummond first came for me, I climbed up in his wagon thinking to myself, now here’s something that’s finally about me. Drummond said no, he hadn’t bought me but I’d be staying over at his place for a while, looking after his family. Miller had told Drummond to come get me before I started my monthlies and he’d fetch me home once I’d gotten bent down some and broken round the edges. Settled was what he called it. I could see I troubled Miller, just my being there troubled him. Too much white in me. And as I grew on up, I guess it got worse.

Turned out looking after Drummond’s family meant breaking in his three boys coming into grown. Drummond said he didn’t want his sons getting on any of his people. He’d had em so long and everybody was related to everybody and all. Didn’t want things getting messed up is what he kept saying.

All his people knew exactly what I was over there for and ain’t none of em reached out a hand to me. Not once. They kept their eyes to the ground because they knew damn well how it would go without me there. I was their angel, their lamb, and boy, did they lay me on the altar. Laid me right out and that’s when I learned to fly.

All that wandering I did when I was little stayed with me. I went straight back to Miller’s place in my mind. Through those fields, down to that creek, right back inside that bull pen. I spent a long time under Phoebe’s porch with those hounds. Laying that soft swatch of dangly hound dog ear across my palm so I could keep touching that warm sleekness.

I didn’t see everything right away. I was young enough at first to think that eldest son had picked me. I thought he reached for me because he liked the way the sun fell on my skin as much as I did. I thought he came to see me. To visit with me. There is not enough room in this world for all I did not know.

Phoebe had told us and told us about boys and men and how they do, especially white ones. But nothing too much like that had been going on at Miller’s place, not that I could see, and I was too deep in my own world to think she was talking about me. I was different and I called myself smart enough to know it. Turns out some things you learn for yourself.

Drummond gave me a cabin all to myself set off a ways and there I was, thinking I was special. Kept on thinking it too, even after that eldest son stepped through my door, ducking his curly head so as not to knock it on the jamb, with the dust hardly settled from the wagon carrying me into that place. I even thought it for the few minutes it took for him to get from sitting on the stool across the room to right up close, with his hands pulling me to him, gentle at the very first, with him only a little bit less ignorant than me.

Those first few moments, it felt good, the strangeness of somebody’s hands touching me but not to set me back or to scrub me clean. As his fingers trailed down my neck and across my throat, with his other arm wrapped around the small of my back, I felt a flush that was new and like the sun shining on me but better.

But way too soon, it was way too much and when I tried to turn away, I couldn’t. It was too much, rising up around me like a flood, and me having nowhere to go and nowhere to put it all, and him wanting to grab me and rub on me and put his mouth on my mouth and his tongue in my mouth.

I saw that youngest brother come in the door behind him and I thought about Phoebe. I felt my bones in the big brother’s hands like a bird fluttering and I could almost hear em snapping. Nowhere to get away and no me there, just a body grabbed and held in his two hands. My body. That was the last I saw of it for a while.

I went into some kind of sleep I only woke from every now and then. Opening my eyes to look around and then shutting them again so I could go back into the land of my mind. People brought me food but they kept their eyes on the ground. Sometimes I couldn’t eat because the food tasted like dirt. Other times, my mouth closing around that piece of cornbread sopped in pot likker was the only thing I could stand to feel.

When I was able to step outside, the sun didn’t warm me like it did before. Everything felt too bright and I kept wanting to go back inside my cabin and lie down. I was lonely, but if I tried to stand amongst the rest of everybody, I’d feel that quiet dropping over em, just exactly the way it used to do at Miller’s when somebody white walked up. Except this time it was me. It was me bringing that quiet hush. Wouldn’t none of em look at me anyhow, so I learned to stay to myself.

I woke up every now and then. Sometimes it was the oldest one grabbing and grunting and pounding, and I’m thinking about a rag doll Phoebe made me once, and then him done and gone. Sometimes it was the youngest one, trying to be a big man but still soft and squeamish, the way boys are with women until they cross that threshold and sometimes even after.

He’d try to get up on me but there was nothing in his pants and he groped blind like a baby. In some way back dim corner of my mind, something said I could wrap my arm around him and let him nuzzle into my shoulder like the child he was, but the thought always died out before it ever reached my hand. When he’d go to leave, bossing me and shoving me and telling me not to tell, I was glad I had not hugged him to me. The thought of me telling anything to anybody at that point made me laugh. He thought I was laughing at him so he’d try to hit me one more time before he’d slam the door shut behind him.

That middle brother was some different than the other two and had been from the beginning, but I was too far gone to make it back by the time he came along on his own. I had got so whenever one of them would come through the door, I’d reach to untie the string holding my raggedy shift to save myself from them trying to yank it off me. But when it was that middle brother, my shift would fall around my feet and I would feel just a little bit different. I’d seen him in the barn with the animals when he didn’t know I was there, talking soft instead of bossing to make them mind.

Sometimes, when it was him and when my shift fell from me, I felt air on me. I felt dim light coming through the chinks of that cabin and his eyes moving across me. In that time before he touched me, all my little hairs stood up from my skin and I knew right then I was still alive.

That feeling lasted until he laid his hands on me. Soon as he touched me, I felt myself get real still. I felt myself leaving, even though I saw him trying to touch me real soft and careful instead of grabbing me. I saw him waiting for me to reach for him but all I could do was look at him from far away.

By this time, there was nothing tying me to him or nobody else. Or if there was, the rope was way too long and I was out of sight. I couldn’t find the strength to pull myself towards anything. Lord knows I wanted to. I was so lonely I’d have taken whatever came my way at that point. Even this white boy who thought he loved whatever he thought I was.

He tried to be sweet but I laid there like I was dead. I knew I was still breathing because I saw my chest moving but my body was this big empty room I was wandering around in. I saw his hands drawing soft patterns on my chest and belly. I could tell from how light he was touching me how good my skin felt to his fingertips, but the closest I came to feeling any of it for myself was watching the look in his eyes. I couldn’t lift my hand if I tried. I’d look down at that hand of mine, telling it to lift itself to the smoothness of his shoulder, but it just lay there.

He was a good man but not good enough. As gentle as he was with me at first, it always got up on him sooner or later. He’d wait for me for as long as he could, but there wasn’t that much time in the world, so he’d go ahead. What surprised me was that I’d feel something new break inside me each time he went ahead without me. After all that time of me thinking there’s nothing left in there to break.

I don’t remember much else. I must have tried to go out to the barn to be around the animals. Before I knew it, they’d taken to tying my ankle with a good strong cord to a ring they bolted to the corner of my cabin. Needed to know where I was, they said. Needed me to be where they could get at me is more like it.

Wasn’t like I was going nowhere. Even I knew I was too lost to run off. I didn’t see how come they couldn’t tell that. So I came into womanhood the same way I came into childhood, tied to the corner of a cabin.

Lots of times, I felt like I was drifting way off and the only thing that kept me in the world of the living was that damn cord. I chewed through it several times just for something to do but even then, I didn’t go nowhere.

One time they found me, I had tied the two chewed parts together again. Guess I was afraid I’d float right off. Course they got a good laugh out of that one. Wondering what God had put inside my head instead of a brain. I wondered that too sometimes.

The medicine was what saved me. Learning the medicine gave me something to hold on to that was not a person trying to take a piece of me. It gave me a place to stand.

Phoebe taught it to me. I used to pester her about it when I was coming up, wanting something of my own, but she’d shake her head and cut her shoulder in to hide what she was doing. She kept saying no, she was not going to show me the medicine or the rootwork either. Said thin skinned as I was, I’d likely fall into it and go too far.

It was right then when Drummond drove up and I climbed straight in his wagon without even waving to Phoebe since I was still mad at her. She’d heard some talk about Drummond but didn’t know for sure so she didn’t say nothing to me about it except I’d be fine.

But when she saw me coming home after those three years over at the Drummond place, she sagged down just from looking at me. She grabbed me and held me as I stepped from his wagon, saying how she should have warned me, how she should have given me something to carry with me.

I remember watching the ground over her shoulder, running my eyes over the grass like a rake, feeling myself floating above the body she was hugging and kissing. I felt so old and so far gone, if I’d a felt this way when I was littler, I’d a thought I was dead.

They didn’t need to tie me up anymore. I’d sit by the door to my cabin, staring at the pattern on the boards, waiting for folks to come. But nobody came. Miller told me I’d have to do something besides lie on my back. They tried to give me some work to do but they kept finding me staring at the wall or the floor, whichever was closer. My hands slack in my lap and my work scattered on the floor at my feet.

They tried everything. Holding back food, yelling at me, knocking me around. But Miller never did whip me. Said I was giving him the spooks, just staring right through him. Phoebe kept telling him give me some time.

It was late summer before Phoebe found a chance to come for me in the middle of a full moon night. She led me down to the far S bend in the creek where it pooled up good and deep. Where the bank flattened a little and had some clay in it. Wet grass on my bare feet and then cool sand. She lifted my dress over my head. The night air breathed on me and her palm rested warm on the back of my hip. She laid me out at the edge of the water. I heard the creek running quiet and close by my ear and I saw moonlight falling bright on me.

Phoebe knelt by my waist with her hands moving over me real slow but not ever touching me. Told me to close my eyes but I felt the heat of her palms when they passed over my face. Her hands moved up and down my body with her talking real soft. I couldn’t understand her but I could tell what she was asking. Calling up some healing so she could put it on me. Trying to see with her hands what exactly needed fixing.

After a long time, she reached across me to scoop clay from the edge of the water. She worked it between her palms until it was soft. I didn’t know till later she was adding some powdered colors she’d brought. Ground up roots.

I felt the summer air warm around me and I felt myself coming back. I heard the clay squishing and slurping between Phoebe’s strong fingers, with her bony knuckles cracking and her voice rising and falling as familiar as if we’d already done this plenty of times before. I felt drops of water falling on me from the clay she was working.