Wash (44 page)

Once through the small side door, the two men walk together down the aisle to the foot of the first set of stairs. They climb side by side, in step with one another. Richardson pauses to check Gamma’s last foal before settling himself on the fourth step, just high enough to see over the side of the stall.

Wash leans against the far wall of the aisle, expecting Richardson to start in on the foal. Its dam, its sire and what he had wanted from this particular combination. But Richardson stays quiet. They sit there for what feels like an hour, watching the new bay foal nurse. He shoulders in next to the old gray mare’s flank, snaking his head under her stifle, butting her in his earnestness then settling in for long sure sucks, his short tail twitching with pleasure.

Richardson sits bolt upright but when Wash sneaks a look at him, he sees his eyes have dropped to half closed and sometimes farther. Seems kind of crazy to come all the way down here just to get some sleep but Wash finds himself grateful for the quiet. Once Richardson slumps against the wall with his mouth dropped open and snoring a little, Wash makes his way back up to his blankets and falls straight to sleep.

Both men hear the morning bell cutting through the misty predawn. Richardson wraps his dream around the sound of the bell ringing until it eventually tears his sleep from him. He jerks awake there on the fourth step, his mouth dry as dirt and sour, his clothes sodden and striped by the cane, sharp tips of grass caught in the cloth. The foal sleeps in the straw, his nose tucked behind his folded front feet, while Gamma stands over him, idly sniffing, with a piece of straw hanging from her forelock.

Parts of the night come back to Richardson. Wrestling to walk with the damp cane slapping him in the face, cutting him. Why hadn’t he come by the road? What had he wanted? What had he said and what had Wash said in return? His mind hunts for answers but keeps coming up empty. He thinks about getting back to the house and changed before Emmaline is up and knows it will not happen. The new day settles down on him like a lid on a pot as he pulls himself to standing.

It is on one of these trips to the barn when Richardson takes the book to Wash. He just wants to show it to him. Thinks Wash should know. Thinks Wash would want to know. Richardson even thinks Wash will be grateful for his having kept such careful track.

Somehow, he pictures them sitting there, side by side, turning the broad pages together. He’s already told Wash about it, more than once, but he doesn’t remember having done so. Liquor makes everything seem possible but then sweeps it all clean, like a broom drawn over the dust of a yard. No more tracks. No more record of anything. Just an uneasy feeling.

Richardson sits heavily on the second step, sets his bottle down, then pulls the book carefully from the canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He lays it across his lap, smoothing its broad brick red surface with his hands as if to clean the dust and chaff off of it.

He sits there looking from the book in his lap to Wash standing in front of him at the foot of the stairs and then back at his hands moving slower and slower. He waits for Wash to come sit next to him but Wash stands there, saying nothing. The worn leather feels so soft under Richardson’s hands. He keeps on smoothing it, over and over, until he has lost track of what he intended and forgets Wash is even there. Before too long, Richardson is asleep. Just like last time. Right there where he sits leaning against the wall.

Wash stands so still for so long the first birds are beginning to sing before he bends to take hold of the front corners of the book and draw it carefully toward him, pulling it slowly from under Richardson’s hands which are spread upon it. Richardson does not even stir.

Wash stands there another good while after that. Holding the book close against his chest with both arms crossed over it and his fingers wrapped around its edges. Eventually, he climbs carefully past Richardson and into his loft. He curls around his book and sleeps. He never even opens it. By the time he wakes, the sun flashes bright as the horses pour in from the pasture for breakfast and Richardson is long gone.

Pallas warns Wash to be careful with that book, the worst would be for somebody to catch him with it, but he tells her not to worry. He’ll bury it deep in his sack, under plenty of bloody skins from his traps, until he can hide it good. As for Richardson, he doesn’t remember taking the book to Wash. He does not even realize it’s missing until he goes to make his next entry a few weeks later. By this time, it’s tucked deep inside a silvery gray hollowed stump in the middle of the swamp where Wash and Pallas spend much of their time looking at it together.

Wash sits on one stepped ledge of the creek bank with his feet dangling in the water. Pallas sits close behind him on the next higher ledge, leaning her front against his back, with her legs wrapped around his hips and her ankles crossed in his lap. She rests her chin on his shoulder, watching him trace with his finger all the names and all the lines connecting them. Page after page after page.

Wash had not realized it had been so many. Whenever his finger slows to a pause under one of the names, Pallas says the name aloud. Wash feels the vibration pass from the front of her chest into his back. Right between his shoulder blades. The shape of the sound of each name enters him at the back of his heart.

Each name, poised at the tip of his forefinger, conjures up a world. When Pallas says Vesta, Wash sees her. That gawky gangly girl at Miller’s place who tried to stay dirty and skinny and out of the way but failed. Wash sits there by the creek on this warming up Sunday, feeling Pallas’s legs wrapped snug around him, as he watches Vesta grow up.

She stands taller and more serious each time she flashes into his mind’s eye. As the years pass, their three boys stairstep their way up her lean sides, staring hard at him from under his own wide brows before turning their broadening shoulders away, kicking at sticks as they head for the fields. That husband she finally took hovers pale as a sycamore in the shadowy woods surrounding Miller’s quarters, watching Wash go.

Wash traces the lines connecting Vesta’s name to those of each of their boys, pausing under each one long enough for Pallas to say the name. Edward, Sunday and then Wash. Each name followed by a series of numbers. Their dates of birth.

He shakes his head. All that life shrunk down into these marks on a page. His life. Their lives. He works to breathe, trying to expand his chest against this steady weight of written words wanting to press him into a smaller space than he can fit. Trying to shrink him. Him and his. All of them.

Words are not enough. There is not room in any one name for all the life it holds. Makes him glad he never learned to read. Never learned to squeeze his world down into these spidery little shapes that can’t hold nothing.

He does not realize he has spoken this last thought aloud until he feels Pallas’s hand close around the talisman he has finally allowed himself to remake. Tucked so deep in the pocket of his coveralls that the small lump of it rides halfway down the outside of his thigh. Pallas’s fingertips are light and warm around its edges as she presses its small dense weight against his leg.

“That’s all right, you don’t need his book. You made yours already.”

He keeps this last talisman buried out here in this silvery stump where it is safe from Quinn and everybody else, whether white or black. Feels good to put it in his pocket, even if just for this short time they get to spend out here.

Wash can feel it resting in his palm always, whether it’s nestled deep inside denim and cotton or sitting in the dark heart of that pale stump. He uses his mind’s eye to look at everything he had collected and laid inside this small circle of leather, each item standing for whole worlds without shrinking any of them.

The last of the dirt from old man Thompson’s island, reminding him that life had once been otherwise and so could be again. A thin scrap of pale green cotton covered with his mother’s careful looping stitch, reminding him to keep his mind in mind. He can see her dark fingers against the pale cloth, each stitch echoing her spare words. You got to intend. By this time, Wash knew to add a few strands of gray from Gamma’s tail to the glossy black strands taken from Bolivar’s because he needs her steady endurance as much as he needs her shiny bay colt’s alert lifting stride.

He feels gladness rise up in him. He has finally managed to find the willingness to return to everything Mena taught him. How to choose what to use, how to shroud each element with prayers, how to breathe his spirit into them before wrapping the leather tight and stitching it closed with bright red string. How to lead this last talisman into understanding itself as a piece of him. How to soak it with spirits sprayed with his own breath from his own warm mouth, energizing it enough to watch over him. All that knowing lies tucked into this small dark bundle, pushed down deep inside his pocket then cupped in Pallas’s palm pressing against his thigh to remind him. His own book.

He closes the pale pages of Richardson’s book, leaving its dull brick red covers to sit heavy in Pallas’s hands so he can stand and stretch. The wind passes through the trees as he unhooks his coveralls to let them drop then steps out of them and into the water. Pallas watches the water climb his legs and then his broad back. She knows how a long swim helps him calm down. Helps him put everything back where it belongs.

While he is gone, Pallas pores over each broad page full of women and children. Going in close for the details then trying to stand back to see the whole picture clear enough to hold it. Yes, yes, yes. Just like she had thought. Dempsey is Wash’s. And Willis and Solomon. Charity’s last two boys and Miranda’s first three girls.

Each grouping stretches across the years as fragile and inevitable as a spiderweb. Pallas knows pieces of this story but the pages of this book fill in the rest. Looking stings some but it lets her be sure. Her chest fills with thankfulness that Miller had let her learn to read.

She is surprised to feel herself thankful, in some deeper harder way, even for that time she spent over on Drummond’s place. If only because it had scooped her empty enough, left her lonely and hungry enough, to take hold of what Phoebe had to give. And Wash too. She knows it’s not always that way. Too often, people stay too tied up to take what they are given.

And yes, the writing does shrink it all down, but how in the world could everything fit otherwise? As long as you keep your mind’s eye good and strong, you can use the words to open a thing back out to how it really was. Just like tracks. A cluster of pads, tipped with claw points, can summon up the whole wolf.

Pallas works to open her mind wide enough to hold it all. Someone has to. She knows Wash won’t carry it. He can’t. He’s had to turn his face away from so much of it. When his hand comes down, when his chest threatens to crack open, when his life gets too big to lift, he looks away. And Richardson won’t carry it either. Pallas knows that he, like lots of white folks, writes things down so he can forget them. She knows it’s up to her.

∞

Now it is full summer. Late afternoon. Pallas turns to lead Wash off the trail. After a while, the woods open out into the edges of the marsh where clumps of swamp grass stud the mud flats, growing thick like hair. As they move deeper into the marsh, the flats get wider and wider until they start to join together. By the time Wash and Pallas reach the first water, the mud makes a beach.

She pauses for Wash to read the swooping pattern of tracks crossing the mud from the water to the cover of the grass and back. A heron stalking the waterline, hunting frogs. A fox tipping along, stopping here to sniff at this empty crab shell or there at that old fish bone before continuing on. A turtle lumbering in the straightest line possible.

Pallas finds a shallow channel cutting through the flats and she leads them up its very middle, placing one bare foot right in front of the next so the slight but steady current will wash away their footprints. The shallow water laps soft on their bare feet and the mud feels smooth between their toes. They turn again, stepping out of the water onto a spreading island.

Before they leave the water’s edge, she bends down, reaching under an overhanging clump of swamp grass to scoop a handful of soft gray mud. She turns to Wash, saying take off your shirt and nodding toward a branch to hang it on. He does what she tells him and faces her, lifting his arms a little.

Slowly and carefully, she smears a thin layer of mud down his sides. It’s cool as she reaches around to coat his low back, through his armpits, and back down the insides of his arms. Then lightly up the outsides of his arms, around his neck and under his ears. She drops to a crouch to do his legs, saying these skeeters love them some ankles. Before she has finished the tops of his feet, Wash feels the mud beginning to tighten on his neck as it dries.

She straightens, motioning for him to put his hands out, palms up, so she can transfer the remaining mud onto them. She had already taken off her dress and rolled it tight in her pack. It is the pale glow of her loose underslip Wash has been following. After rinsing her hands, she unbuttons the front of her shift and steps out of it, reaching to hang it next to his shirt, then turns to face him, waiting.

He stands there looking at her for a long minute until she wraps her still muddy fingers lightly around his wrists, drawing both his hands, palms facing her, toward her body. He aims for her breasts but she steers his hands just above so they land higher on her chest.

“Let’s see can we leave them clean. Just so long as you daub around my neck good, and my belly and my back. Skeeters love my low back.”