Wash (41 page)

It was embarrassing more than anything else, was what Sullivan had kept saying, but William understands the problem. Many of the potential bidders are his customers at the Richardson store. Fond as they are of him, he knows they have trouble with his trappings. More his rich backers than his colored wife, but his abolitionism makes them increasingly uneasy. He also knows that the roughened settlers who have lived in this muddy little frontier outpost for years are offended that three investors they barely know can buy the Bluffs, then meet with a judge to draw up papers allowing them to sell off the lot next door plus those down the street.

William climbs his father’s stairs thinking maybe his grandfather’s town building scheme works best when practiced on more virgin land. He remains confident that Memphis will grow and even flourish, but he has already realized this growth will happen on a much longer timetable than the one his father has in mind.

Before William even steps into the room, Richardson has decided he does not want whatever news William brings about the sale. Not now. He’s mad at himself for his outburst and spent by it as well. He looks over his shoulder at his firstborn standing in the doorway and cuts him off before he can open his mouth.

“You must be tired. Go take a nap. Memphis will take time.”

As William, relieved, pulls the door shut behind him, Richardson turns back to his figures, thankful they fill his mind. Writing and rewriting them into ever straighter columns, adding then checking and rechecking soothes him, brings a sense of order to his world. But pretty soon he runs out of calculations and there is nothing left to do. He doesn’t have the heart to go over the map of Memphis they had commissioned, with its four squares and a promenade along the river.

As the afternoon light starts to lengthen, Richardson looks through the tangle of bare branches to the lay of the land beyond. He remembers being able to cast his eye across those hills and valleys just like a net, seeing immediately the best way to divide them into desirable parcels. Riding across those virgin acres with his surveying tools, carving up this frontier as easily as a hunk of meat, then selling it off to his newly arrived neighbors.

Now when he looks out across that land, it won’t bend to his hand, not even in his mind. It sprawls there, impassive and vast. He is surprised to feel himself finally starting to turn against the way he was taught. It has taken all the way until now because the lesson was drilled in so deep. Gather, increase and pass it on. At all costs.

But as he watches the people his children have become, he sees how having and being given changes you. Blinds you to certain necessities and leads you to take too much for granted. Mainly, it weakens you. Robs you of your own decisions.

Even as he has worked so hard to build his temple to leave to his boys, he has also begun to want to tear it down. Take it with him when he goes. Give them the chance to make their own way. It is turning out to be harder than he expected to give a gift to those who refuse to see how it has been made.

He unfolds Gamma’s pedigree, drinking and planning which stud will be the best choice for her last few seasons. As each of her grown foals fills his mind, he can feel the animal under him, the length of its stride, both down a wooded trail and across the meadow. The house is quiet, the sky blues toward purple as the snowstorm clears and the liquor begins to shroud all he has tried to put out of his mind. Soon his cheek rests on his elbow and he’s asleep.

Emmaline hardly ever lies in her loft, looking out this west facing window, watching the sunset. She’s usually too busy. But on this Thanksgiving, when all the Richardsons have eaten a large late lunch and then disappeared to nap it off, she has time to finish cleaning up, with a minute left over to climb into this loft Richardson built for her. Tucked between the kitchen ceiling and the floor of his drinking smoking room. This place of hers that does not give her room enough to sit up without knocking her head on the enormous beams supporting the house’s second floor.

Today she has time to let the trapdoor at the top of the steps from the kitchen fall closed behind her. Time to crawl stiffly across this low loft on her hands and knees to her pallet then lay herself down. Time to pull her Bible from the worn front pocket of her apron and set it on the windowsill. Time to feel the wonderful stillness of finally not having to move anymore seep through her as she watches the tatters of the day go by.

She lies there on her back with her shoulders propped up against some sacks of meal. She lifts one hand to graze the ceiling of this den of hers with her fingertips and looks out the small rectangular window Richardson had insisted on putting in for her, saying everybody needs to see out, Emmaline. She remembers how she had responded to his comment inside her head.

“Well, I don’t know about you but I might rather stand up than look out, seeing as how that world out there goes on mighty well without me. But you go on and you do what you think best, Mr. Man, since that’s exactly what you’ll do anyway.”

She thinks about how Richardson put her right smack in the middle of things, folded into the heart of his house, like a raisin into batter. Telling her about how he wants her where he can get at her and how he hates the look of all those little outbuildings scattered around, making everything look raggedy.

She remembers letting his talk swirl around her as she decided to make having to be his anchor work for her. She thinks about her three grandsons, most likely sitting around somebody’s fire down in the quarters, or maybe even gone off courting on this holiday, and she’s glad to be buying them some room to maneuver.

She pictures all that her boys might be doing out there in the wider world as this loft of hers, well warmed from the kitchen below, falls into darkness and the redgold tongues of this particular winter sunset stretch across her upraised arm like honeyed amber candlelight. Pure molten gold pours from a bright crack in the deep indigo of the passing winter thunderclouds. All of it framed by the jigjaggedy black arms of the bare tree branches. Makes her glad of the window, even though this is the first time in longer than she can remember when she has seen anything out of it besides flat blueblack dark.

Next thing she knows, it’s dark as the inside of somebody’s mouth and Richardson’s banging on the kitchen ceiling underneath her. Hard and sure, three times, with the tip of his walking stick while she swims up from the bottom of her dream as he calls out for her, saying it’s time to lay out some supper and asking where has she been.

All right, all right, she’s saying. It’s all right there and I’m coming.

Still groggy from his own unintended nap, Richardson had stepped stiffly into the gloaming of his darkening kitchen, empty for once of Emmaline. So quiet it made him feel naked and old. Laid bare. He wants to walk into his kitchen and have Emmaline moving around in there. Cooking, making, tending, keeping, fixing. Doing all the work that adds up to his life.

Emmaline feels almost like his heartbeat, so when she climbs up in that hutch of hers to lie down for a minute, when she finally stops moving, Richardson finds himself overcome by that skittery panicky feeling that hits just as he falls into a deep sleep or wakes up out of one. Whenever he has been lying so still for so long that his heart has truly slowed down. That feeling of being caught and pulled under until the only way out of it is to move a little to make his heart gallop, trying to catch up with him.

It is in that instant, when he realizes how slow his heart can beat, how close to stopping it can come, that he sees how all the activity he had thought was his own life is really just a fluttering against the deep quiet that his heart stays forever wanting to fall into.

Richardson does not like it when Emmaline slows down. As if she could slip under and pull him down with her by stopping like that. So he keeps her hopping. Makes sure of it.

∞

Richardson

By some miracle, my father rallied in his nineties, giving my younger brother Henry the chance to grant him one of his last wishes. He wanted to see what he kept calling my empire. None of my other brothers had done quite so well, he was fond of telling me, and what he wanted was a trip to see my world before he left this one. Henry told him he could die out here, if not on the way. But my father said it would be about damn time, so Henry loaded him up and he arrived on my doorstep in early March looking tired and perhaps a bit thinner but exhilarated.

He found what he called “the whole thing” heartening and I was moved by the pride he took in my accomplishments. He was far more interested in the house and the barn and the mill and the gin and the nail factory than he was in any of my children. He glanced at each one as I introduced them but his gaze soon skimmed over their shoulders to take stock of my fields and my furnishings. He constantly interrupted their stories at dinner to go back over and over the specifics of my development of this place.

He did seem to see Cassius out of all of them. Perhaps because my second son made sure of it. Or maybe because we were up to our ears in another one of his improvements. Determined to drag us into the future, Cassius had insisted that I expand both the kitchen and our adjoining smokehouse, saying we’d outgrown my original design.

I didn’t like the idea of so much change, nor did Emmaline, but we’d let ourselves be overruled. Before we knew it, there was a great hole in the wall. Predictably, the work spilled over into my father’s visit but there was nothing to be done about it.

My father insisted on hearing about Memphis and wanted to go there but thankfully, a trip was out of the question after the latest road repair washed out again. I told him only that our plans were coming along and then tried to distract him with some mechanical or technical matter. But he was like a dog with a bone, hewing avidly to the exact issues I would have preferred to avoid. Lot sales, the road and the county seat.

Because aging requires so much energy, my father was unable to appear even remotely interested in anything beyond his few core obsessions. He kept after me about Memphis and I dodged the truth for as long as I could. Then I simply turned to face his disappointment. It was almost a relief to tell him about the failed sale. To admit that Memphis was still staggering, almost willfully refusing to prosper. As soon as he had broken me down, he started sweeping up the pieces, telling me not to worry, that everything would work out fine.

My Lucius used his considerable charm and their shared interest in Memphis to get the old man to tell stories even I’d never heard. But my father could only sit still for so long. He insisted on going and doing, dragging Lucius with him everywhere he went, even through a sudden snow that made a lie out of our early spring. And so no one was surprised when he showed signs of a flu before his third week was out. He went downhill fast.

Doctors were no use. I sent for Pallas and she came.

Perhaps we all have moments in our lives to which we can trace awakenings. Usually they are few and hard to hold on to. Sitting there with Pallas, seeing my father out of this world, was the day my vision started to clear.

As often as my father insisted he was ready to go, he wasn’t at all. We sat there in that shrouded room with his words pouring over us like water. He’d get on a jag and couldn’t be turned from it. Staring at the ceiling, reciting endless lists of transactions, and repeating his dictums over and over.

“Brick by sodding brick. That’s how you lift yourself from the gutter.”

“Men without property are not thought much of.”

“Opportunity lies all around, you have only to bend it to your hand.”

The hammering from Cassius’s renovation echoed beneath us, syncopating its rhythm into my father’s ranting. I felt sandwiched between the generations and I remember wincing as I finally heard something of the way I must have sounded in all I said to Wash. Just like my father. And Pallas just sat there, resting her smoky gray eyes on me and refusing to look away. She was watching me start to see and we both knew it.

There were revelations. I knew he’d crossed from England alone when he was about the same age as my Lucius. But I never knew until his very last day on earth that my father had been orphaned at seven years old. As for those next seven years, wandering the streets after his parents died and before he made it onto that boat, he never spoke about that time. Not even in delirium.

All he said was, “They died. One then the other. And I was alone.”

But I could see the fear in his eyes. He looked at me and didn’t see me. He was that small starving boy once again, that boy he’d spent a lifetime banishing. Building cities, towns, an empire. Overeating his whole life. Trying to outrun this terrified boy who dogged his tracks all the way through and then caught up with him in the end.

It was in that moment when I caught my first glimpse of my own lifelong push. I was shocked to discover I’d been driven all my life by my father’s ancient and frenzied fear of the gutter. I shouldn’t have been able to hear his grasping desperation from where I stood, but that was the day when I saw it had haunted me throughout. Perhaps even fueled me.

The moment did not last long. Then it was gone and my father was breathing his death rattle. Pallas stood to lift his shoulders so his head could fall back. She was trying to help him breathe, acting like we wanted him to live and our wanting could make it so. I reached out to touch her arm where she had it looped around behind his neck then shook my head no and sat back in my chair. She looked at me hard and I nodded. She pulled her arm away and laid him back onto the bed.