Wash (37 page)

Somehow, this idealism enlivened me as much as it aggravated me. I found myself curiously hoping against the inevitable destruction of such shining optimism. Watching the excitement and determination on their faces made me want to say aloud, if I cannot have my innocence, then you at least should have yours.

∞

Wash pushes the girl’s mouth from his crotch as Eaton yells at her to get back at him and Richardson flinches but doesn’t look away. She stands up, trapped between Wash about to knock her back and Eaton getting after her. Then all Wash can see is that girl’s mother’s face when he watched them ride in on Eaton’s wagon. Nervous. Wary. Looking around. One hand clutching the side of the wagon and the other on her girl’s shoulder. Always wondering what’s next. What the hell will be the next damn thing. That picture of this girl’s mother, looking around all worn down, rises up in Wash’s mind and freezes his hand in midair.

It is a Sunday in mid-October, crisp and bright outside the closed barn doors. Late rains have brought forth one last blast of color before winter strips the leaves from the trees for good. Richardson has made an exception to his usual rule and decided to let his old friend Eaton put two of his girls with Wash. Here on his own place, in the big barn. Eaton has had no luck since he left Charleston. One of the two men he bought there turned out to be sick from the start then died before they had even crossed the Tennessee line, taking the second one with him not too long after.

But Richardson’s relieved their stopover coincides with this particular Sunday when most of his people are gone for the afternoon to a prayer service over at Miller’s. He’s surprised by the difficulty Wash seems to be having and he starts to regret his decision. This was a favor and they never work out. Makes him glad he’s been sending Quinn to watch after Wash these days instead of going to see for himself. But Quinn has today off too. He’d disapprove of this exception and he’d be right.

Wash drops his hitting hand as the girl bites off her scream and they all stand there for a minute, hearing each other breathing. Eaton’s horses are stamping and snorting with impatience at being left harnessed after having come at a good clip all morning. They jerk at their bits, wanting to stretch their necks down so they can scratch the sides of their itchy faces along their bony knees. The dust they have kicked up spins in the light.

As slow as an old man, Wash settles on the end of the bench they’ve dragged in and lies back. He clamps his eyes on his loft and lets his arms hang off the sides of the bench to the floor. His hands rest in the dust, palms up and open. The girl moves back over to him, soft and quiet as leaves falling, to kneel between his legs. Something drops even Richardson’s eyes to the floor as Eaton turns on his heel to fetch the second of his girls.

And way up in the hayloft, Lucius pulls back from where he’s been looking down over that high edge, watching Wash with the girl. With his father and his father’s friend and the horses. After meeting Wash’s eye for an instant, he turns away to curl up in the blankets. His stomach heaves, even as his first sexual flush rises through him, but he works to stay quiet. He buries his face in the blankets to smother his crying, smelling horse and smelling Wash.

It is the next Saturday afternoon when everything rises up in Lucius all at once. His family comes home from a neighbor’s wedding, bringing two boy cousins for a visit. It is just as they climb down off their horses and out of the back of the wagon. It is when Emmaline steps forward to take his knapsack. It is when she reaches out to pull him to her, teasing and playing a little like always, but now it is in front of his whole family and his cousins as well, and now, today, it is all wrong.

Hatred rises so fast he can taste it. Like dusty bricks. He hates Emmaline for all she is and all she is not. He hates her for being his mamma and for not being his mamma. For being her baby but not anymore. He hates her for tending him as steady as a low flame and for not being able to save him or herself or Wash.

He slaps her away from him, stomping toward her and yelling at her. He calls her all the nasty dirty names he has heard the older boys use. And he does it in front of as many people, black and white, as he can. Then he stands there, feeling her hands fall slack and away from him and seeing her mouth make a small o as the warmth drains from her face.

Richardson doesn’t see it happen. He’s busy giving Ben careful instructions on how to tend one horse who has come up lame on the trip home. Lucius runs off with his cousins come to spend the night. Without Emmaline to make them change, they head out into the woods in their good clothes, hunting something small to kill. All through the rest of the afternoon, they feel flush with power and togetherness, giddy with belonging.

But Lucius’s running carries him away from the other boys until he finds himself lost. He runs on through the woods yelling. Then he is screaming and crying, then gagging and coughing, cutting both his pants and his legs on thickets of hawthorne and blackberry. Running and running until the tearing in his chest matches the tearing in his heart and he trips and falls to lie there with his face in the dirt. Grabbing fistfuls of fallen leaves and dirt and rocks and pounding the ground with them until the sound of his own rattling breath has died down.

After what feels like a long time, Lucius sits up. Everything is quiet and everything is different now. This same forest that has always felt like his own leafy insides whenever he’d wandered through it with Wash now stands with its face turned away from him.

He realizes one of the sounds he’s hearing is the river so he knows which way to go. He stands up stiff and already sore. As he walks slowly back to the house, even the last few bright golden leaves seem to curl away from him, as if refusing to feather his passage like they used to, and Emmaline’s face keeps appearing before him, her eyes stunned flat and the small o of her mouth refusing to close and smile and act like nothing happened.

That night, just like many more still to come, he has to see her and be tended by her, eat what she fixes him and step into baths she has drawn for him. But she acts so dry and careful, it’s like the somebody he knew has died and left him but still stands there looking at him. He stays cross and rough with her to keep this ghost from coming too close. He hopes she will reach out for him as much as he hopes she won’t. He hits a lot of things after that, especially animals and especially when they are least expecting it.

Wash

Oh, it’s a lure all right. I can see doing how they do. Even that boy.

Makes it too easy, having everything laid out in front of you. Seems like the mean comes up in you whenever weakness lays in front of you. Like you got to stamp it out before it gets on you.

I felt it come up in me sometimes. Certain ones they put me with. All that wriggling and screaming did was make those peckerwoods feel us helpless all the more, so sometimes I did knock her back. Put us all out of her misery.

I knocked CeCe back and I broke her tooth. And I know I put fuel to their fire that see, we’re all just animals, and so it’s fine to do us this way.

But what I did was, I got it over with. It was CeCe trying to hang on to herself that made them want to take it. That’s the part she won’t see. It’s that tight grip that’s sure to get broken. Draws their eye right to it, and then they need to do something about it.

There’s ways to hang on to yourself. You just learn em, that’s all. But CeCe wouldn’t see, and her carrying on was taking up room we didn’t have, so I knocked her back and I got it over with.

Her mamma knew though. She’s old enough and seen enough to know how things go. Nothing works like you think it should. Everything’s backwards if it’s even in that much order.

Her mamma did not turn away from me. Even when she held her girl’s head in her lap, sopping up that trickle of blood and smoothing her forehead, she didn’t turn away from me. She looked up at me where I stood in the doorway leaving, and she just looked at me. Knowing why I did what I did.

She’ll pull her girl through and not by putting it all on me. She’ll tell her it’s more like the weather than one somebody. More like a windstorm passing through, tearing things up and breaking em like sticks. Never meant to. Weather never means to, it just comes through.

That’s what I felt like sometimes. That’s what it all felt like sometimes.

Pallas

I’d sit in my chair, or I’d stand looking out my window, and I’d feel my fingertips running across my lips real light. Thinking about the way Wash does that. Running his fingers over my face like he’s blind. Touching my mouth after I say something, like he’s tracing the words to their source.

And I saw what he did to that girl’s mouth. I fixed up CeCe with my own hands and all the while, she’s cutting her eyes at me since she’s heard I talk to him. And I want to say shut your mouth. I want to say I put him back together just like I’m doing you and don’t think you can even start knowing one thing about me. But I don’t.

And I can see his arm raised and his hand coming down through the air towards her face. I can see it all when I look inside her mouth with that jagged broken off tooth.

I put some poultice in there to mend the inside of her cheek where it keeps cutting open against that tooth. I tell her mamma, let’s put some wax on there for the time being, with her mamma nodding. And then that same night, I sat there by him in that hayloft window, holding the hand he hit her with.

So I kept an eye out and I stayed ready to roll out of the way, or else I steered clear altogether. He’d never mean it, but I’d leave this world before I’d take another knock and he knew it. But people didn’t mean half the things they did and sometimes, slack was all we had to give each other.

∞

Pallas is one of the few who has decided not to dull her sight or look away. She tells herself things cannot stay like this. Somehow, some way, this world of theirs will shift and slide into some new shape. All of this will tilt and fade and crumble in the long run. The only question is just how long is the long run and can they hang on long enough to make it? And if not them, then theirs.

She makes an odd hard peace with Wash’s situation which she has to make over and over again. When she can manage it, she takes comfort in finding his features and his manner in more and more of the youngsters she sees on her rounds through the neighboring places. She pictures herself working to bring enough of these children of his into this world to make sure some part of Wash will last long enough to stand in the free and clear.

In a strange way, these waves of his children please her. They are like one of those slow but steady rising tides he has told her about in an ocean she has never seen. And in a quiet, central part of herself, in the part that can be about more than just herself and what she wants, she is proud of him. But the two parts of her wrestle over it, with sometimes one winning and sometimes the other.

She has to work to be kind to that woman over on Grange’s place. Molly has made her four girls a family. Insists on calling them Richardsons regardless of how Grange lists them on his ledger. And she waits for Wash in her cabin, refusing to be one of those closed faced women in Grange’s barn. Soon as Molly gets word of Wash coming, she cleans up all her girls so they can stand around him in a neat quiet ring, mesmerized by seeing their own features in his face. She wants to be sure they know he is their father, no matter what people say.

Just last year, Molly lost the fifth girl at three weeks. Pallas was one county over when it happened but she tells herself she would have tried just as hard as with anybody else. And she knows better than to say one single word about it to Wash. If he wants to tell her about walking all the way over there for the funeral then deciding at the last minute to watch from well back in the woods, that’s up to him.

But Pallas can be hard for Wash because her first instinct is too often a turning inward to a place where he cannot follow. When she gets gone from him, he tries to tolerate it by reminding himself he has that inside place too. Mena had made sure of it. He used to know how to find it on his own but that was so long ago he’s almost forgotten. Until Pallas came along.

Just in time to call his remembering up in him before it disappeared completely, buried under all that has happened to him since. Even that first week, watching her moving around that hot sticky cabin tending him then sitting down for a minute with herself, his own remembering had started to come back to him. Like hearing an echo.

All those endless days on the island. How he used to walk way out into the soft still water of the sound before curling into a ball so he could sink to the bottom and lie there, lightly bumping against the sandy floor, tugged by the drift and pull of the water but barely. Held for those few long moments, balancing between his body’s relentless desire to rise and breathe the air of this world and his spirit’s hungry hunting for a dimly familiar grace and ease.

So he understands Pallas. He does. The only difference is that Pallas does not need the sound or even a pond, and she can stay longer than anyone he’s ever known. And it’s easier to envy her this gift than to remember how he’d once had it himself. Feeling her slip through his fingers opens a wanting door he needs kept shut. When he starts to feel left behind, he panics and a blind rage can well up in him.

He tries to turn and walk away. Climb down the steep bluff to the river running deep and wide under the overlook. Slip into the water just between dusk and dark when nobody can be sure exactly what they see. Water’s cooling fast and the current is too strong for him to drift quiet and still on the bottom like he used to but he has found ways to make it do.