Wash (42 page)

She and I sat there together, one on either side of him. We did not look at each other anymore. Instead, we sat watching my father die. We were the gates he was passing through and we let him go. I’d hoped he would come naturally out of his delirium for a moment before he passed. I hated the thought of him going through this one last door still terrified, still scrambling, still thinking he was nothing. But that is exactly what happened.

Pallas stood up to lay two fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse. After a long pause, she did not even look over at me. She just went about her business. Crossing his hands on his chest, pulling the sheet over his head and opening the curtains, whether to let the light in or the spirit out, I had no idea.

She fetched her basin of water and set clean rags on the table by his bed. Then she stood there looking at me. Waiting for me to go so she could get started. Waiting as if to say go on, go tell everybody. Go on and stand around with each other, putting your mouth around whatever words you all use at times like these.

In the face of her calm capability, tinged as it was with impatience, I felt as helpless as I’d ever been. Almost translucent. For an instant, I wanted to take the cloth from her hands, dip it in the water then wring it out as I bathed my father’s body myself. But it seemed somehow impossible.

Pallas was ready and she was able. I bowed in the face of my failure and left the room. I shut the door behind me and went to my study to pour myself a drink using hands that felt like they belonged to somebody else.

After I don’t know how long, Cassius knocked. I thought he’d come to offer his condolences but I doubt he even knew about his grandfather yet. As he charged across my threshold, I turned to pour him a drink but he shook his head.

“Not now. You need to take a look at this.”

He was carrying something in his hand, a stout and twisted stick, coated in a chalky white dust that was still falling across the floor and down between the boards. Cassius brandished this twisted stick at me as if it were somehow my fault but I’d never seen it before it my life.

“What is it?”

“It’s mojo, goddammit, and it’s everywhere. I’ve told you and Quinn has never stopped telling you, but you won’t listen. Wait till he sees this. No wonder he made sure to build his own cottage himself.”

As my second son badgered me while my father lay dead in the next room, I stared at that stick. It was almost as long as my arm and only half as thick but gnarled and knobby. It was two sticks really, each twisted around the other, like two snakes mating, making a kind of braid, with sinewy humps lumping up wherever they overlapped.

Two different kinds of wood woven into one but not by human hands. They’d grown around each other on their own. I’d seen that kind of thing in the woods myself sometimes but never thought much of it. Now that I was looking more closely, I could see that it carried an undeniable charge.

“But I don’t understand. Where did you find this?”

“It was plastered into the wall of your kitchen all along. From the very beginning. And you never even knew.”

By this time, Emmaline was hovering behind him, careful not to step in the dust lying scattered in an arc on the floor. She had her lips clamped down hard and Cassius kept jerking the head of the stick over his shoulder towards her, saying she had to have known. She had to have.

Emmaline kept trying to hand him a cloth, saying hold it with this, even as she had to duck back so he wouldn’t hit her with it. Eventually he stopped thrashing and stood there. Emmaline’s eyes met mine over his shoulder and she watched the thought come into my mind. Virgil and Albert. My first two men. Those first two men I bought in Charleston. I could see them. Tall and quiet and solid. Small eyes set deep in impassive faces.

Thompson had warned me not to buy saltwater negroes, but they were so dark I didn’t even see those thin laddered scars climbing their cheeks until I was miles from Charleston. By then it was too late to turn back. Both men had already been here for years before I bought them and they turned out to be such good workers that I soon quit worrying about their country marks.

It must have been them. They had built that kitchen wall while I bricked the front one. They had worked alongside me, looked me right in the eye, then plastered their mojo into the walls of my house.

No wonder they never would step across my threshold. Always stood outside, waiting for me under my big elm. I thought they were being respectful. Polite. Made me wonder what else they did and who else had laid curses on us over the years.

No wonder Emmaline wore that Bible like a shield. I guess she’d had plenty of curses sent her way as well for having the key to my smokehouse. I knew she couldn’t read but she always said it made her feel better just to touch the words. I never suspected she was using it as her talisman. Mary would have had a fit had she known but it made perfect sense to me.

I sent Cassius off to burn the stick and turned my mind to burying my father. Cassius went straight to Quinn, who came after me right away, ranting about how he had kept on telling me and telling me but I couldn’t hear him. I sent him after Cassius so I wouldn’t have to listen.

Thank God Emmaline had her grandson build them a separate fire down by the quarters. They were about to throw that twisted stick in her kitchen fire but she wouldn’t hear of it. She stood there all afternoon, making sure. Not that it mattered much since the damage was already done, but as Emmaline always said, there’s no reason to spit at the devil.

William made it back from Memphis in time for my father’s funeral and by then, even I had to admit the drinking was beginning to show. His broad face remained as smooth as ever but his hands had started to shake. Soon after he returned to Memphis from his Thanksgiving visit, he’d written that he and Celeste had been banned from the city limits on account of their support of Miss Bryce. Her disastrous fall had tarred them too. But he’d closed the letter by telling me not to worry.

William, God love him, never did accept a thing about human nature. It’s not that he didn’t understand it because he did. He fought my last war by my side and was held prisoner with me in that dungeon of Beauport long enough to know the depths to which men can sink. He simply refused to accept the truth of it, insisting anyone could be lifted up. And I mean anyone. He always swore there must be a better way.

As much as I admired my firstborn son, the trajectory of his life was painful for me to witness. I remained staunch in my support of him in the face of increasing criticism. I can see now that it was because he carried some part of my younger self I’d long since abandoned. But William’s determined optimism is what destroyed him.

It was the gap between the ideal and the real that finally broke him. Not so much the gap as his drinking to bridge it. The alcohol abraded his capacity to react, dulling his instincts until the people out there couldn’t rely on him anymore. They stopped listening to him and started telling him what to do instead. There was not much I could do for him except watch him go downhill which is a difficult thing to do for someone you love.

Just like William, my Lucius worked hard to find his way. He left Emmaline and Wash behind as he tried to grow up, but I couldn’t tell him the stories he needed to hear and my father hadn’t left him enough room to find his own. And as much as my boy wanted to move to Memphis, he could see that William was in no shape to guide him, even before Celeste wrote to say it was impossible.

I think it was hearing William gone slurry at my father’s funeral that made Lucius mad. He left the room before William even sat down. Headed out in his good clothes. Mary wanted me to send someone after him but I thought what he needed was time. The rain caught him at his farthest point, waking the flu we didn’t even know he’d been fighting.

His cheeks always flushed so rosy, we hadn’t noticed anything and he never said. On that day, I’d just assumed it was his temper flaring. Thought he was upset about his grandfather and William. I may have even told him he needed to try feeling less strongly. Rein in his emotions. Don’t take everything so much to heart.

He fell sick just as my apple trees flowered. One month before he was to turn fifteen. Doctors came and went but there was nothing to be done. At least Wash would’ve known to keep him out of the rain.

Once again, Pallas tended him with me. I continually sent my wife away as if the boy had been mine alone. Pallas and I sat there with him as he disappeared over the edge. I was determined to bathe him myself but I’d only wet the cloth to wipe his forehead before Pallas stepped up and took it from me.

I don’t know how long I’d been standing there, smoothing those dark brows against his pale forehead. Just like mine. But this time, I stayed in the room and I watched her until she was through. I built his coffin myself that afternoon.

∞

Richardson takes his best bourbon to Wash in the barn. For once he has nothing to say. Not one word. Grateful he has caught Wash alone, he sits down next to him. On the same step. Closer than ever before but Wash doesn’t move away.

Wash knows Lucius has died because Pallas stopped to tell him on her way home. But he blocks the boy from his heart, just like he has most of his own children. All those growing up boys, sassing him in front of Binah and everybody else. Even those girls of Molly’s. Not to mention the ones he doesn’t know. Just thinking about it is too much most of the time, so he rebricks the wall he’s built between himself and all of them.

Richardson hands Wash the bottle then takes it back. Richardson likes drinking after Wash. Bringing the hard round smoothness of the bottle’s mouth, still wet, from Wash’s mouth to his own. Feeling the liquor’s clear fiery nothingness at first. Then a burning warm down his throat from out of that cool glass mouth. Feeling that heat moving through him and knowing Wash has just a moment ago felt exactly what he feels now. The liquor’s warm tug.

Moonlight falls into the big barn through high up knotholes. Richardson tips back until the edge of the next higher step digs into his low back. Wash leans away, against the side wall. Their two pairs of long thighs jut out in front of them, side by side. Wash’s thick under the worn cloth of his coveralls and Richardson’s narrow under the corded twill of his breeches straining across the points of his bony knees.

Wash knows without looking that the older man is tilting his head back to look at him from under those hooded lids. Feels those eyes lying heavy on him. Wonders what’s next. What is the next damn thing?

Wash feels his hands being drawn towards Richardson. He imagines one hand hooking under Richardson’s jawbone, sinking into the softness of his neck while the other wraps around the bend of Richardson’s temple. That old thirsty pull. But he tells himself no. No matter how satisfying it would be.

He hears Richardson say without saying, come closer. Tell me. Let me know. Wash looks down at his hands where they rest on his thighs. Trying to keep them still, he tightens his fingers around that ticklish place just above his knee. He hears Diamond tell his story.

“Beat the tar out of this nigger.”

Wash sets his face against the coming grin and he can feel Richardson wondering what he is thinking about. Let him wonder, dammit. Let him stew.

Next thing Wash knows, his hands are wrapped around Richardson’s face so tight he can feel the skin slide between palm and bone. Somehow Richardson has been dragged across Wash’s lap. He lies there staring up at Wash from inside the frame of Wash’s squared off fingers. What little light there is gleams off the wetness of his eyes and Wash feels Richardson’s want without having any answer for it.

Wash could kill him right here and now and they both know it. One quick wrench of his head from his neck and that would be that. But then there he’d be. No way out. Nobody else could have done it but him. Folks around here act like they don’t see Richardson steady coming to Wash in this barn but they do. They know. All of them. It would take less than a day for it to come out.

Wash watches Richardson’s eyes gleam wetter and wonders. Is it Nero? Does he want the same rush that flooded him when he stabbed Nero? Is he trying to make Wash push him back to where he had a life he was willing to kill for? But he’s not reaching for his knife. Both hands lie open, palms up, in his lap.

Wash feels his grip tighten until he starts to sense some give and then he gets it. What Richardson wants is his story. He wants to know how does it feel. To be trapped. To have your grip knocked loose over and over but keep going. How to find a way out of no way. Richardson wants to own him and his story both but there’s no way.

This understanding pours through Wash like relief, loosening his grip until Richardson starts to roll off his lap. Wash jerks one knee up, pushing Richardson the rest of the way, sloughing off his bony drunken weight with an involuntary shudder. Then he looks down, watching Richardson throw his hands out, trying to break his fall. One palm slides along the edge of the first step, catching an enormous splinter in the web between his thumb and forefinger, as his other palm hits the floor where his long pale fingers starfish in the dirt.

Wash sits there, watching Richardson scrambling for purchase, and shakes his head, almost laughing as he does every single time he realizes he would choose his own lot over this other. No question. Lord have mercy.

As this knowing pours over him, running down his sides like foamy waves, Wash feels Mena, pleased and glowing. She’s so close he cannot see her but he knows her top lip is drawn tight to shiny across that crooked front tooth from the small downward arc of her grin. Her arms are wrapped around herself and Wash knows exactly how her palms cup her opposite elbows as he stands up, turns to climb the stairs and then the ladder, leaving Richardson good and behind him.