Wash (48 page)
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As the years pass, Pallas looks for Wash coming up in his children and she finds them around her wherever she goes. The ones who can listen, she tells them all about him. So some of those children grown into old people will have a dim remembrance of this pale thin woman laying her cool hands on them and telling them about their daddy.
“Thick and heavy as wood and burning just as clear as that fire right there.”
The two boys sitting there in her cabin look at her and then at each other, still suspicious because they have different mammas. But something about the look coming across her face while she’s telling them, like she’s barely in the room, like she’s still looking this man in the face she’s telling them about, something about the way she’s seeing him so clear convinces them she’s telling the truth. And somehow they know to take that truth, awkward as it is, and tuck it away deep inside. And they know not to ask their mammas about it, or their daddies, whom they look nothing like.
She takes the hand of the taller quiet one named Horace, turning it over and then back again, gently splaying the fingers out then touching her palm to his palm.
“Yep, you got his hands with those long squared off fingers.”
And the younger one named Daniel starts asking what did I get, what did I get? She takes his chin in her hand, turning his earnest little face to hers and looking into it hard, then smiling to say you got his eyes with those thick brows so broad across your forehead like wings, and those dark dark eyes that let you fall right inside. And those lashes curled back and tangled, she murmurs to herself as she turns away, like it hurts a little.
Some of his children choose not to believe her. They go running back to their mammas, one of whom comes storming into Pallas’s yard, jerking at her skirt and twitching mad about how come Pallas don’t know how to leave well enough alone. And Pallas looks right at her, saying now come on, Harriet, you know as well as I do, anything can happen on any day and we got a lot we need to put inside those little minds. No harm in starting early and you know it.
“You want to go on lying when they already know they ain’t their daddy’s sons, shooting up past their sisters and brothers and dark like that, you go ahead. Why the hell you think they came to me in the first place? It’s their own sisters and brothers shutting em out, calling em names, and all the while wondering if you are a whore.
“No need to tell the whole story, but I sure as hell won’t watch his children wander this earth without giving em nothing. Not even one thing to hold on to. I’m giving em whatever they want, just as soon as they start asking for it. And I’m going to keep on giving it, as long as they keep asking, and as long as there is breath in me. Now get out of my yard.”
One day she comes upon young Earnest in Miller’s barn, staring up at one old gelding hanging his long lean face over the stall door. She tells the boy all about how his daddy was good with horses, the ease he had with them, and the way they came to him and stood so close. She sees Earnest’s face shine with the wonder of learning about his daddy as he scratches an itchy spot on the gelding’s throat until his big bay head hangs almost down to the dirt. Earnest loves hearing this secret said out loud and Pallas loves watching him being his daddy without even trying.
They all carry some trace of Wash, no matter who they came from. Sometimes Mena, but mostly Wash. Some little hint in the shape of a face or a look in the eye. Maybe just the mannerisms. That dead on, straight ahead way he had. Wade right on through the water to get to the other side. No looking for a boat or some other way across because that’s just a waste of time. Besides, he was always strong enough.
When Pallas tells her stories about Wash to his children, she gets to be with him herself. She describes how mean he acted when she first met him, how he liked to have bit her head off when she took him that first supper.
Then she tells them how sick he was and how she held the hand of this big strong mean man. Pulled him back from where he was staring straight into death’s door and how he turned out to be a real sweet and tenderhearted man underneath it all. And how he had returned the favor by bringing her back into the world of the living.
They asked her were you sick too? And she said not exactly baby, not exactly, but I was a little lost and he came and found me.
It would be easier for her if Wash hadn’t burnt the book but she understands why he did it. And maybe it’s better this way. Who knows? There’s no telling. But at least she had seen it all written down. She had run her eyes and her hands over and over those names as she sat there snugged between Wash’s legs wrapped around her, holding the book open in her lap and leaning her back up against his chest, his chin resting on her shoulder as he looked at it with her. She had felt him crying too, jerking with sobbing but quiet, and holding on to her as tight as if he were being pulled hard downstream.
They are lucky to have you, is what she kept saying to him.
“They are lucky. Just look at em, coming up so strong and beautiful. They got you and they got your mamma and your daddy and your careful uncle and your sweet granddaddy. And the scary one too.
“They got all y’all, and it was me who pulled em into this world. They’ll be all right. They’ll be more than all right. They will shine. They are coming up all over and they will shine. Don’t you worry, I will tell them. The ones who can hear me, I’ll tell them, and even if I can’t get through, they’ll find a way to know. You’ll see, they will know.”
It is winter again and the trees around Pallas’s little house are bare. Leafy bunches of squirrels’ nests catch her eye where they make knots high among the latticework of bare branches. Richardson has been dead ten years and Wash nearly twelve but Pallas somehow looks the same. She didn’t get sold and she still lives in this cabin because Richardson wrote it in his will, just like he told her he would.
A flock of blackbirds arrives in a cloud like music then settles in the treetops, falling quiet and disappearing into the stillness of its roost, but only for a moment before some internal disagreement, or maybe a hawk, sends them on again. All those small single bickering birds pour from their separate roosts, woven by movement back into one living breathing thing.
In that moment of seeing them fall in and out of moving together, Pallas knows, as sure and clear as a footprint, how things are and have always been. She sees that all of them, her and Wash, his mamma and Rufus and Phoebe, and even all those white folks, good and bad, here and gone, all of them are and have always been part of this one living breathing thing, moving through a time and a space bigger than any of them ever knew.
And yes, there are moments when they fall out of moving together into the stillness of their separate roosts, moments when all you can hear is their aloneness and their apartness and their bickering, but at the same time as all of that, and just as true, is their capacity to pour out of their separateness back into this swooping graceful oneness where each of them knows somehow when to glide and when to bank.
Pallas has felt this knowing before and then lost it because it comes and goes. It never seems to stay. She has had glimmers before, sitting beside the water sometimes, but it has taken her until she is old and stiff and alone to see it clear.
As this clarity presses then burns across her forehead and at the base of her throat with what Phoebe used to call the annointing, she can see Binah placing Wash’s outstretched palm just there at the base of her own throat until he feels the heat pulsing under his fingertips. Pallas touches the same spot, just below the small hollow Phoebe had filled with white clay.
Never mind that Pallas was not there on that day to see what Binah did with her own eyes because now she knows this feeling for herself. She can finish the story Wash started for her, just like Wash learned to finish the stories Mena started for him, saying to himself, oh, now I see, this is what she must have meant, all full of that feeling of the world falling back into place.
Pallas remembers how easily she used to move into this knowing, most often by herself as she walked through the woods, disappearing into the green walls of snaking leaves, but also sometimes with Wash, walking out into the soft dark water of their summer pond, feeling its rise on her skin.
She can feel both his stories and hers, everything they told one another, playing and pulling around her like the current in the river running below the bluff where her little cabin sits, even now. She sees the faces of so many of his children who came to her because she alone chose to stand inside her knowing and let it anchor her.
And she remembers falling out of it too. Days when the interlocking patterns connecting everything seem to have faded into gone, leaving this world drained empty of all the meaning it had once held.
What Pallas understands now, finally, is that this knowing leaves in order to grant you the chance to call it back. To take hold of it again. It falls away to give you the joy of its return. Sometimes this knowing is given but most times it is made.
The side of the porch presses hard and steady against her back as she sits watching. She feels her heart swell and contract right along with that flock breathing in the sky and she knows, just as sure as the shape of her own hands, we are all of us one thing. All here, all connected, all the time, regardless.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Corinna Barsan, Elisabeth Schmitz, Morgan Entrekin, the whole Grove/Atlantic team, Marly Rusoff, Beverly Swerling, Stuart Horwitz, Rob Spillman, and Elise Cannon.
Thanks also to my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, for being such a thorough teacher; to my parents for protecting my imagination by getting rid of the television and for making sure that I got outside of the South enough to see it clearly, even as they taught me to value my heritage; to Ida Mae Lawson and her descendants for helping me learn to hear more of the notes; to Tot Goodwin for sharing his graceful connection to the natural world; to my former students in both Birmingham and the West Bank for modeling bravery and integrity; to Lonnie Holley, Jimmie Lee Sudduth and all the visionary Alabama artists who inspire me; to Patricia, Jeannie, Maple, and Helen for guiding my understanding of the bigger picture; to Flight of the Mind, Hedgebrook, and Mesa Refuge for giving me space and time; to the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Southern Collection at the Birmingham Public Library, and interpreters at historic sites throughout the South for all the various ways they seek to address the thorny issue of interpreting our collective past.
This story has carried me down a long road and brought me a great deal of help along the way. I am so grateful to the many generous spirits who resonated with this story and helped carry it to this particular destination, to those who saved a place for me when this work took me away from them, and to those who taught me what I needed to know.
Finally, I want to thank all the ancestors who haunted me into unearthing these stories and weaving them together into one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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