Wash (34 page)

I’m nodding yes.

“That’s what broken open feels like.”

I’m hearing him and I’m wanting to believe him but I’m climbing a long hill just to find some level ground. Sometimes, I’m glad we only get some chances here and there to be together. Each visit holds so much, seems like I need that whole time between just for me to take it all in.

One night he says he has an idea. He figures what I need is to be around it without it being scary to me. Says he had to do this same kind of thing with Queenie’s filly, after the side panel fell off the hay wagon right behind where he had her tied to the barn. Said she must have thought that wagon was reaching out to grab her and eat her up. She panicked so hard she broke her halter, trying to get away.

Said it took him days of walking that filly back and forth past the spot so she could see everything clear, and it was another few months before she could handle catching sight of that wagon. But she made it. Said all it took was time.

Next moonlit night, I’m laying beside him on the dry grass next to our tulip poplar by the pond. He’s stretched flat on his back and I’m snugged in close on my side, running my fingers across his chest under his shirt, and I’m feeling it well up in him, making him breathe out real slow and start to turn towards me like he does, making me want to pull away like I do, and that right there is where we go past talking for the first time.

He asks me do I feel it coming up in him and I nod, yes I do. My hand is frozen, laying on his chest and I’m hearing him say that’s from my being right here by you. But you know what? You ain’t got to do a damn thing about it. You just sit tight right here by me. You ain’t got to do nothing.

He lays one hand over mine, pressing it tight to his chest, saying feel my heart. He’s holding my hand against his chest then running his other hand down his belly. Opening his pants to wrap a hand around himself and talking to me real soft till I can feel his talking in his chest almost as loud as I can hear it with my ears. And he’s moving his hand while he’s saying I’m just wanting to get closer and closer to you. Best feeling place I know.

See, here it is, coming up on me like waves. You never seen the ocean. I need to tell you about the ocean and it’s something to see, but this right here is pretty close.

And he has set up a steady moving all in and through him. Not a big moving but steady, with his heart beating hard as a hammer through it all and speeding up. He’s asking me do I feel it and I’m nodding, yes I do, and he’s saying ain’t nothing you got to do about it except let it come close.

He’s moving more now and my head can’t rest on his shoulder, so I sit up but stay real close, with my hand still flat on his chest, held tight under his hand. And he says look at me, and I can see his chest and his low belly moving to different music but going together somehow, and his hand is moving, with his face staying so calm, right next to all that moving, and he turns a little so he’s looking at me.

Then, right while I’m sitting there, feeling his heart hammering under my palm and looking in his eyes, I’m watching it moving over him. I see his face so calm, even as the pale comes across his rising and falling belly, with him still looking at me from wherever he’s off drifting and floating, and I can see he’s in pieces. But then, after a little while, here they are, all coming back together again.

He’s saying falling into pieces is part of it, and I’m saying well, I guess it depends. But my hand feels nailed to his chest like I’m never taking it off and I can’t help feeling like a child busting with pride. After a time, his heart slows down and he says I can look after myself. You ain’t got to see about me. And I say well, that’s a load off my mind and we fall out laughing without really knowing why.

Sure enough, with this new answer for the feelings I bring up in him, I manage to let more and more of that moving come closer to me. I reach out for him and I climb right up him, just like that vine, then I sit back and watch. And before too long, I’m starting to want me some of that moving. Each time, I’m headed farther and farther down that same road myself and he’s just holding me, watching me and seeing me. He showed me what to do and he left me to myself.

Bit by bit, I got closer and closer, till one night I was going so smooth and steady and fast, covering so much ground, I felt like a bird flying down a road. I could see my story hovering off to the side, out of the corner of my eye. All the trouble I could get snagged on. Me standing in that cabin. That middle brother even. But I just kept turning my mind away from those pictures I did not want. I kept looking straight on down my own road, trying to see where I was going instead of where I’d been.

Then all the sudden, it was like the road started curling around, coming back towards me, and I’m blooming open inside to a place I didn’t even know was there and then I’m drifting so soft and nice with Wash wrapping himself around me and saying see, baby, you see that? And I’m nodding yes, I do.

He gave me some time and I felt myself drifting, just the same way I’d seen him drifting, and after I don’t know how long, I felt all my pieces settling back in place inside me with his arms around me and I’m home without even trying. I felt his voice thundering inside his chest, even as low as he was talking, asking me did I like that and was it all right with me, and I said yes, it was.

Not such a bad place is it? And I’m saying no, it’s not so bad at all.

You think you might like to go back there again some time? I’m nodding yes, I might could do that, and he’s pulling me close, looking out over me into the night, and I’m feeling us so peaceful with my heart picking up a little bit from thinking, well, may be. May just be.

Not that it was all easy and sweetness and light with Wash and me. He came into this world full of edges, and his life brought em on out, so we fought.

It’s hard for a man to be sweet all the time, even when it’s only part of the time, and I had to back him off me every now and then. I told him just because I let you close don’t mean you can take hold of me whenever you want. But it was hard for Wash to think about asking, seeing as his work didn’t have much to do with asking.

Some days, just as sudden as he came in, he’d leave, trying to get clear of me before he started breaking things. And he’d go long stretches without coming by. I’d meet him at our pond and he’d sit way down the other end of the log from me, picking up sticks and breaking em. And I’d be thinking fine, break all the sticks you want.

One day he stopped in at my cabin needing to see me. It was a Monday after he’d been gone. But he hadn’t taken the time or trouble to shrug the trip off him before he came ducking through my door. I was in a hurry, pulling my medicine together, trying to go see about some folks waiting on me, when he grabbed my wrist and pulled me to him, like I was just something he saw and wanted for himself.

If I had not sat next to this very same man out by that pond and heard what he had to say to me, I’d have gone after him right that minute. As it was, I yanked my arm from his grip and turned on him.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? You want to spend your whole damn life tied up in somebody’s barn? Don’t you want to carve out at least one corner that’s yours?”

He’s backing away but I keep after him.

“Don’t you come to me till you pull yourself together. I’m working hard to hang on to my little patch of clear and I will not let you track all kinds of mud in here.”

I’m yelling at him but low and steady like a whisper.

“It’s the grabbing that brings a whole bunch of nothing right back at you. And then you stand there empty handed, shaking your head and acting like you’re no different from the rest, even when you and me both know better.”

He stands there looking at me but he’s not seeing me.

I tell him, I can draw some of that mess out of you. If you want. Give me the hand you stay itching to hit me with. And I step closer to lay his palm on my belly.

I’m looking at him, asking him, you want this grabbing feeling to come off you or not? You need to want it gone for it to go. Now do you?

He jerks his hand from me, sweeping it wide enough to knock my medicines off my table onto the floor, saying goddammit, take me as I am.

I got real quiet and I said let me tell you what. You ain’t gonna grab me and you ain’t gonna hit me. Not you and not nobody else. Those two things ain’t never happening to me no more. Ever. I’ll put a bigger hole in you than Nero had.

I see him right quick remembering how I wear a knife, and he’s backing up because he knows I’ll use it.

“There’s another way to be, and if you want to stand next to me, then you best find it. Now get the hell out of my place.”

After that, he knew not to come see me when he was in one of those moods.

Part Five

Early October, 1823

R
ichardson rides once again through the last of the woods toward his place. Mary and Quinn hadn’t wanted him to take this trip to Nashville so soon after judging the murder case. It’s only been three weeks since the trial and Charlotte still haunts them all. Sitting up late sharpening her pastry cutter then killing the husband and wife both, leaving a flurry of fear in her wake. Richardson told Mary and Quinn they both needed to steady their minds because there was no way out of this trip. He had to meet the commissioners himself to make sure they chose Memphis for the county seat.

At least they’ve had some rain since then. After these last two thunderstorms, golden leaves lie shredded and torn on the cool moist ground, silencing his horse’s footfalls. He’s glad he chose this young bay gelding Bolivar for the trip to Nashville. Omega would have been dragging by now. Two full days on the trail and both of them up most of last night. A panther kept screaming to establish his terrritory, first from one side of the valley and then the other, until Bolivar needed to stand close to Richardson’s fire and look right into his eyes to keep from bolting.

Tired and dirty as he is, Richardson feels less and less ready to get home. Soon as he rides through his gate, they’ll all be pulling on him and he won’t have a good answer for any of them. He finds himself making a detour to the spring they had used when he first came out here. It should be running after this rain and he can wash up.

He guides Bolivar onto the deer path leading down behind the ridge where they had built their very first fort. As he rides past the spot where his brother David was ambushed and killed, the young gelding snorts and blows. Richardson nods his head in understanding. It has always felt spooky to him too.

As they reach the spring, he dismounts and loops his reins on a branch low enough so the gelding can graze. He steps around to where the ground drops off, remembering how pleased they had been to have created a kind of spigot so the springwater poured out from waist level and they could wash like civilized people. Not having to kneel at the water’s edge like Indians.

He rolls up his sleeves and stretches his hands toward the shining stream of water. The cool of fall has gained a cutting edge. He stands in a patch of sun but cannot feel its warmth. He starts in on the caked mud and blood from last night’s rabbit but ends up just standing there, holding his hands under the water and losing track of time. Watching his hands curl and curve into each other as if seeking refuge without finding it. Thinking about those first few of them, so young and ambitious, having made it through the Revolution and headed West all those years ago. Determined to get away from slavery but then running right into the Indians.

So many of his early companions are dead and gone now. The corner of his thin lipped mouth twitches in a wry smile as he realizes he only misses some of them. The ones he saw die in front of him are the ones he misses the most. And his brother David. Despite the relentless womanizing, Richardson misses having someone who shared his story. At least parts of it.

Get there first was what their father told them on that first Christmas dinner after Independence. Don’t go empty handed.

And they hadn’t. Richardson and his brother had received those first land grants fair and square. Their brand new government, flat out of cash, paid its soldiers with grants to western land it did not yet own. Their father had lent them money to gather more. They bought some grants from soldiers who didn’t want to move west, some from those too broken to know what they had and then simply took the rest from those who never turned up to claim theirs.

All this would have been obvious to any quick thinking man so Richardson convinced himself that he’d earned it, if not with the fighting and sitting in chains, then by coming all the way out here and taking it. Making it his. Pushing back the Indians and writing up statehood. He had even laid out his first small town like his father taught him. Got the road and the county seat both that time.