Wash (45 page)

Wash bends over her careful and slow. After a little while, she says come on you, twisting away from him to dip for one last handful to dab on the backs of her knees. She rinses her hands then slings the water off. After tucking his shirt into the waistband of his pants, she turns up a game trail toward the center of the island with the mud drying on her back and her shift hanging from her hand, swinging a little as she walks.

As they move deeper inland, the ground turns from clay and mud into sand. Thick trees around the waterline open into small glades and she leads him to her favorite one where a thin vein of creek water cuts toward the middle of the island and a cluster of young maples provides some cover. They squat side by side on the high bank, looking out across the slough. The bare trunk of a long dead tree arches smooth and pale out of the water and then back in. By the time they get to this spot of hers, the low light reflecting off the water throws bright patches against the underside of that curving trunk.

She takes his shirt from where it’s tucked in his waistband and she spreads it on the ground. He takes his pants off and hands them to her. She lays them out below where she has put his shirt. He lies down inside the shape of him she has made. She sets down her pack, takes her dress out and spreads it on the ground next to where he lies. Then she hooks her shift on a branch, steps across her dress and lays herself on top of him.

Pallas

Sometimes I’m over him and other times he’s over me, holding himself up over me so he can see into my face. He knows how I am about looking over somebody’s shoulder. Somebody up on me and I’m just having to look over his shoulder until it’s over with. He knows about that part because I told him and he’s careful about it now.

He’s over me, looking down at me, holding his eyes on my face and arcing towards me, and I’m rising to meet him, feeling my body finally knowing itself and its place, and I’m finally having the sense to just follow it, following it up and to him, and up and with him, and we are making our own net and I can feel myself coming together again, all my parts coming back together and then falling open and apart, back into pieces, but it’s all right this time. This time it’s happening inside this place we made between us and there’s a net. A net woven from our looking and strewn all through with our seeing and our stories and he is looking at me and seeing me and holding me with his eyes.

And yes, the other stays always there, like a shadow and tugging at me, but more and more, I can hear something saying, this is not that. I hear my body saying to myself, this is not that, and his face is rising back up through all those other faces and his hands are not those other hands, and this is giving not taking, and I am staying and staying and staying until I fall open and pieces of me drift down, falling across me and him and the ground as soft and light as petals.

A long while later, once they are separate again, lying side by side on their backs, each inside the shape of their own clothes, they look up through the canopy of bright green. The thin layer of mud on their bodies has caked and flaked and mostly been rubbed off. The light bouncing off the water has moved from the smooth underbelly of that curving trunk to dance against these young maple leaves arching overhead, making their new green flutter into brightness and then back.

Wash falls right to sleep but Pallas sits up to look out over the water, hearing Phoebe telling her if you can find some quiet sitting, looking close at something God has made, seems like life can’t get on you so hard. Some of the women talk about praying and Pallas isn’t so sure about that. But a little while of sitting still and looking close, lost to time passing, carries her back to the sweetness of being small.

She casts her eye across the pale tan floor of the creekbed. Starts to see how it’s covered by an endless web of shadows cast by the light falling through the trees, all twined one into the next by overlapping branches, some arched like an eyebrow and some crooked like a finger, but all of them coming together to make this bigger pattern. A web as full and complete as any creature.

She studies it and thinks, here it is. This is how we all connect. All kinds of different people who don’t have one word to say to each other, but we’re all lying tangled together on the muddy floor of this life. Making new shapes that don’t look like any of us on our own. It’s the light that lays us down together like this.

She lies back and watches the constant fluttering play of brightness on the leaves overhead. The water stays always moving like breathing, lapping against edges as countless creatures slip in and out of it. Fish surface then disappear. The tweedy thrum of crickets swells and fades. Pallas thinks to herself, well, they got their church with their light falling red and purple and blue through their Jesus in the stained glass, but this is chapel enough for me.

The raucous cry of a heron cuts through the steady hum and wakes Wash. They sit up to watch the bird take off from another dead tree. He moves so slowly at first it seems he might fall right out of the sky. By the time he crosses overhead, he has gained some height but they can still hear the slow screak of air moving against his wings. They step down into the water, scrubbing the last of the dried mud off each other.

“We best go. Moon’s coming up full tonight.”

Once they are dressed, she leads the way out of the swamp to the road, asking him over her shoulder does he think he can find that place again and he nods even though she isn’t looking back to see him. They part ways before the end of the path but only after stopping to listen good. They each slip out onto the road, heading in opposite directions, and they both make it to wherever it is that they’re supposed to be well before dawn. Plenty of time to slip onto a pallet and wake up like they spent the night there.

Pallas

All at once, it came to me. Sitting there next to Wash, looking close till I saw that great big web laying across the creekbed leading out to the slough, that’s when I knew. This right here is how they’ll see us later.

All those people who’ll come along later, trying to see us, trying to make some sense of our lives. First, they’ll only see the bigger pattern laying on the bottom, the one made by our shadows knocked down on top of each other, just from the way the light falls across us, with most our details gone. We’ll be all blurry and twined together in that net, laying under the water like ghosts.

I just hope some few folks will have sense enough to turn their heads to look around and see. There are all different kinds of trees, some closer and some farther away, each one standing in its own patch of ground with its own stance, all coming together to make this one web of shadows. And yes, it does make a picture but it’s only one out of all of em. There’s always more. You can be looking at the exact same thing and get different pictures just from changing the way you look.

But what I didn’t know yet was, we’d still be here this whole time, watching you look. Seeing if you see. That’s what death does, it lifts you up. You can see everything from here, much more than you ever saw from inside your own life, but you can’t get your hands on none of it. And sometimes, you just want back inside something you can touch.

Soon as you get gone, you start wanting to come back. Both at the same time. And it stays like that all the way through. Turns out the veil between the worlds is real real thin and we tend to pass back and forth for a long time before we get anywhere close to done.

∞

They have high water late that summer as if to make up for last year’s drought. That’s how Simpson’s new man Booker comes canoeing up the branch hunting turtles and sees Wash sitting on his stump, holding the book open on his lap. Sees him well before Wash knows he is there.

Before Booker even has the chance to holler at him, Wash is up and walking into the deep shade. He knows it will take Booker longer to paddle back to Simpson’s place than for him to reach his loft. As he stuffs the book inside his pack, he tips his head to Mena, asking her to clear his path, and then flattens his face just like Rufus taught him to, and sure enough, those few folks he does pass on the way home take one look and step aside. Wash hides the book behind the wall under the far eaves of his high loft before he can breathe easy.

Caught him redhanded is what Booker keeps saying over and over to Simpson, determined to get his reward, whether it be a dollar, a bottle or a day off. Simpson rides up to Richardson’s door that next morning, demanding Wash be whipped for reading. Richardson keeps insisting Wash can’t read but Simpson won’t let that fact matter.

“My man Booker swears he saw Wash holding a book out there in the marsh, a big fine book, holding it wide open in the broad daylight. That is good for three stripes or else a fine and you know it. Somebody’s got to do something. You said it yourself.”

Richardson assures Simpson he’ll take care of it just to get the man off his doorstep. As he turns, shutting the door behind him and climbing the stairs, it comes together in his mind. Of course. That’s where the book has been. With Wash.

Even as relief pours through him, he feels that familiar panic pressing at the very top of his chest near his throat, a panic that comes over him whenever the extent of his drinking is made clear to him by some slip, some mistake, some lost time. A shudder runs through him and he actually has to gasp to get some air as his hand tightens on the banister. At least he knows where the book is now.

Rumor swirls so fast that Wash hears about his whipping before Richardson has even decided what to do and certainly before he says anything to Wash or even to Quinn. But tonight is the second of the two big celebrations Richardson holds for his people each year. The whipping will have to wait.

Flames jump golden into the falling dusk. Emmaline’s two oldest grandsons turn a pig roasting in a deep pit at the edge of the side yard between the house and the quarters. As the fat starts to crisp, every mouth waters. Small groups wind their way over to this feast, singing as they come. Their burning pine knots glow hot yellow against an indigo sky.

Richardson stays away for most of the evening. He knows how his presence alters everything. He doesn’t want to watch the show his people inevitably put on for him nor does he want to watch them drink till they start to cut the buck. He’ll only have to crack down. He has decided the less he sees the better. Cassius has assured his father he can manage so Richardson has decided to try and let him. For tonight, at least.

Wash stays away too. Waits until the tail end of the evening. By this time, most folks are so drunk on the liquor and the singing and the licking orange flames they don’t take much notice. They let him step into the circle so long as he stays on the edge.

Richardson eventually drifts across the lawn toward this circle long after the rest of his family has headed to bed. All that is left is more singing. Standing around in the dark, passing the bottle, letting the harmony reverberate through them.

Richardson pauses near Wash but still half a step back. The pale of his face shows in the firelight only when a log pops and shifts. Even as he wonders whether Wash knows he’s close, Wash catches his scent. That particular mixture of hard soap blurred by bourbon. Wash doesn’t turn to look at Richardson. He knows he won’t dare start with the whipping business. Not here, not tonight. But still.

When the bottle makes its way around to Wash, he takes a long swallow then holds its round golden smoothness out toward Richardson at an angle where the rest won’t see. Nobody notices Richardson drinking after Wash before handing the bottle back.

They start in on the psalm about the rivers of Babylon. Richardson’s favorite. They go round and round with the psalm until Richardson can feel the water pouring over him too. He feels his heart drop open during one particular harmony and even more so at the long moment of perfect silence that follows it. He turns to leave. No topping that.

As he walks through the dark with the psalm ringing in his chest, he remembers Plutarch’s warning:

. . . how dangerous a thing it is to incur the hostility of a city that is mistress of eloquence and song.

He sees Cassius brandishing that chalky twisted stick. The white powder fallen dusty across his floorboards. Virgil and Albert’s mojo, buried there from the beginning. Then he hears Quinn saying over and over, I told you but you couldn’t hear me.

Another psalm circles the fire, passed from one throat to the next just as surely as that bottle but with endless variations and harmonies. A city that is mistress of eloquence and song. Whatever else they may be, he thinks to himself, his negroes are certainly that.

Unable to bear going upstairs to bed, Richardson sits on his dark porch listening to song after song. When the level in his bottle has sunk considerably and the last of the singers has drifted off to bed, Richardson remembers that Wash’s book is down there in the barn. He must go find it.

Wash has been into his own bottle too, so this is the one time Richardson has ever been able to sneak up on him. Richardson surprises even himself with his sudden strength and sureness as he climbs carefully, very carefully, all the way up to where Wash sits in the window of the highest hayloft, holding the book open on his lap, running his fingers across all the names. There’s plenty of moonlight but Wash sits next to a candle in a tin can. He hears Pallas telling him be careful with this book, keep it hidden good, but he figures everybody is too drunk to take much notice tonight.