Wash (43 page)

That next morning, Wash runs Richardson’s northern line of traps. He steps down from the crest of the bluff toward its edge. Each step loud in the crisp cold quiet. He passes the sooty circle of ash where he and Lucius used to build their fire and feels the boy hovering close. As he scans the ridges of the surrounding hills, Mena and Rufus draw even closer.

First they linger on the edge of visibility, like the pale green hazing through the bare winter branches. Then they fill his mind’s eye. He can see them both watching him marching off to meet his maker back at that big Thompson place, so cocksure and not listening to a damn word they said. The helplessness they must have felt then courses through him now and, although they are both long dead and gone, their sudden closeness catches him hard like a shiver.

Rabbit running over your grave, Mena says, rubbing his shoulder.

Wash shifts his weight, shaking his head at how her knowing keeps unfolding long after the point when he can look her in the eyes and tell her yes, he does see and yes, he does know. And she feels this turning in him as he comes to understand all she’d worked so hard to give him. He likes knowing she feels all this now, right along with him, just like she did last night in the barn when he decided not to kill Richardson and to live instead, and she is pleased.

As he turns for home, he notices two deer cresting a distant ridge and wonders how any of those runaways ever make it to the county line with the leaves down. He tries to imagine leaving but wonders whether he will still be able to feel Mena so close if he goes. He knows she’s inside him and with him always, but staying here in this same landscape where they had lived together makes her much easier to hold on to. Each time he passes under the huge elms arching together over the road, he hears her saying how there’s nowhere for your eye to travel round here. Each time he steps over the pale tangled roots of that biggest beech, he sees her trailing her palm across its smoothness.

Soon other pictures flood his mind. Pallas’s slender shoulders disappearing down the path ahead of him into the heart of the swamp. The pale bone colored turtle shell she found for him to hide in the leaves covering Mena’s grave. All these children, growing up looking just like him whether they like it or not. Wash knows he could carry these pictures with him in his mind wherever he goes, like Mena had to, but he wants to be able to lay his hands on all of it for as long as he can, come what may.

That same afternoon, Richardson watches Wash coming back. He’s standing beside Lucius’s grave. A mound of impossibly fresh soft dirt spills under the skirt of the hemlock that hides Richardson from Wash’s view.

His body feels as if it’s hardening and there are sharp pains whenever he moves. All the forward momentum that had once seemed effortless has disappeared. It feels as if the strong supple body he always thought of as his has run away and left his spirit trapped in this box that cannot and will not do what he asks of it. This spreading stiffness must be what ice feels like when it is forming in water and it enrages him.

Liquor loosens him and lets his mind wander. With enough of it, he finds that slice of time when he can float back to how things used to feel. Regain the sense he’d once had as a young man of being on the brink, full of certainty that the understanding he’s been chasing for so long will soon be within his grasp. Just a little more, always just a little farther, and then he’ll be able to see everything clearly.

But that same mist he remembers stepping through earlier in his life, hunting clarity, all it does is continue. He is no closer now than when he started. There seems to be no end to it and that can’t be right. All the elements that should hold worlds within them, his plans, his city, his sons, his books, his own heart, all of which had always seemed so deep and endless, have become shallow bowls. He is not sure how this has happened and there is no one to ask. No words either.

He can see Gamma and all her foals through the years. The horses they became. He can see his family spread out everywhere and growing. His empire taking shape, his status accumulating. His second son planning to pick up where he left off, expanding his reach. Richardson can throw his mind like a net across everything he had intended but when he draws that net in, it is empty. There is nothing in his hand.

Richardson

I remember thinking my own life was the only one I had. Once it had ended, it would be over. I was convinced we were as clamped inside time as a stone set in a ring. It took being broken open to lift me to some higher ground.

My raising had rendered me unable to see that my story might be a live thing. A creature with intentions of its own. Thompson had tried to warn me, and more than once, but I couldn’t hear him. Whenever he tried to suggest that my story could be using me as much as I was using it, I brushed him off. Told him that sounded like mojo to me.

Accomplishments were what mattered. Failures were gaps to paper over. Being good was being right. Being wrong was due to some secret hidden brokenness. Evidence to be buried. And suffering was to be avoided at all costs.

Each era is knit together by its own logic and we certainly had ours. Most forgeries are discovered only by succeeding generations. The slight gaps and giveaways don’t show up until later because all those living inside the same time as the forger share the same eye and can be more easily fooled.

What interested me was when someone cropped up in his own time with a differing eye. Like my William. And Lucius. They were proof that some few of us can see outside of the logic we are given.

But I knew that seeing alone can’t build enough of a bridge to carry you across. Usually all that seeing does is break you instead so I feared for my boys and rightly so. I may have even urged them to blind themselves a bit, so as to make their journey through a world not of their making slightly smoother.

I had decided early on that all the paths across time and between eras were gone. No one in any time to come would ever be able to see us clearly, so why even hope? What surprised me most was how powerfully I wanted things to be otherwise.

As I aged, I was haunted by dreams of standing deep in tall grass, down close by the edge of a broad shiny river. Even as I remained convinced I would be unable to cross, I remember feeling that strong swift wetness surging up over my shoulders. Pouring around my mouth. Sometimes my whole face. I kept stepping out into that current over and over, even as I was sure I would drown, so I must have known something about the landscape of eternity after all.

Wash

Just cause it’s over, don’t never mean it’s finished.

And no matter how different he was taught, Richardson’s stories stick just as close to him as mine to me. No matter how hard he worked to bury the ones he didn’t want, just like his daddy told him to, they keep pushing up through the dirt like hardy weeds. His dead brother lying scalped, right in the middle of the trail. Those hogs rooting at the men he left behind. Even old Hargrove, still stomping on Moses. But Richardson never did learn to tell his stories to himself, so he left this barn empty handed every time.

What I see now is, our pictures hover close, no matter whether we hold them tight or push em away. Took me all the way till now to see just how far you can fall inside your story and how fast. And every time you try to tell it, that story starts moving, making you find your way through it all over again.

One thing I do know, whichever path you decide to take through that story, it’s up to you to steer your mind one way or let it go another. Every minute of every day. All the way from then to now and beyond.

I remember my mamma telling me to watch out for the pull of that first path. She said once that very first creature makes its way through the tall grass, the rest of us tend to fall right into that same trail, whether it’s the way we meant to go or not. Force of habit cuts a groove and that groove has a pull to it. And every single time I felt myself dragged towards one white man then the next, I saw the truth in what she said. Long enough of that and you start to learn.

But I fought my knowing just as hard as Richardson here. Even when I knew better, I fought it just as hard as I fought everything else. Lucky for me, my stories wore me down till I had to take the truth in my teeth and bite it. Chew it up and swallow it down.

Come to find out, we stay swimming through time whether we like it or not. Everything is now. Already and always.

All those stories you don’t find some way to tell will wrap round your legs, just as sure and sharp as saw grass. You’ll walk through this life and the next, bumping into your memories just as real as Emmaline’s hams dangling in the dark of Richardson’s smokehouse, coated gritty gray with salt and gone dusty with bluegreen mold.

Knock into one of those and you’re wearing it, no matter how hard you try to say otherwise.

Pallas

When I watch Wash falling back into the grip of his story, him and Richardson both, I can hear Phoebe telling me, remembering is more than just falling right back in there. Remembering is more than that. She told me if you don’t watch out, those stories of yours will come right up in your yard and worse. Dropping crumbs on your floor and won’t go nowhere.

“Those stories piled up on your doorstep, they need to learn to let you be. They don’t own you. Let’s see can you travel lighter. Make you a box and lay those stories in there, then close it up good. That way, they’ll be there when you need em and they won’t have to hound you every minute of every day.”

And I can remember sitting there, staring over Phoebe’s shoulder, trying to hear her, trying to picture what it would feel like to be that free, and I felt myself floating right up off the ground.

But not everybody hears Phoebe inside, and you can see their story twining up around them. They stand there, trying to grow tall like a tree, but there’s poison ivy vines climbing hairy and thick, wrapping around that trunk to choke it, no matter how strong. Makes you wonder who’ll win out.

But Phoebe kept after me. Saying those damn stories so greedy and shortsighted. You can’t give em everything they want, they’ll swallow you whole. Then where will they be, with you gone?

See those stories for clear, was what she told me. Some are children and don’t want to grow up so you got to do the tending.

Then she asks me, how come you think it is I’m still here, standing in front of you, babygirl? How do you think that is? And she’s hugging me to her, and I’m hearing her telling me yes ma’am, we all got a right to the tree of life, and I’m feeling my knowing start to come alive and move.

When I watch these two men get caught up all over again in everything that has happened, I try to remember that feeling of my knowing unfolding inside me, wet as new wings. But I keep my mouth shut because if there is one thing I know by now, it’s that some things you need to come to on your own.

Part Seven

Early summer, 1824

S
ummer comes early after a wet spring. Richardson is up late again and restless. He wanders outside into that small pocket of quiet after the cicadas have stopped and before the birds start. The heavy dew soaks his boots after a few steps.

Between the house and the barn, there is a dip where the ground sinks and gets marshy, by the pond where cattails and cane grow thick and tall in the low ground. Richardson had made sure to swing his road out wide behind the house before cutting across to the barns to stay clear of this dip that sprawls here. But tonight he has had too much to drink and thinks he should be able to go straight at a thing, damn the consequences.

Wash wakes to Richardson’s thrashing and muttered curses. When he steps across the loft to peer down through a high knothole, the moon is still bright enough for him to see the trail Richardson has blazed. The tops of the cane rustle and cussing drifts out like smoke.

Wash shakes his head, almost smiling. Notices he’s not even mad. That’s when he realizes he’s become a new man. He climbs down the ladders and stairs, slips through the small side door, then walks across the dewy grass to the closest edge of the thick patch of cane. Waits for a break in the thrashing, then coughs once into the silence. Claps his hands softly a couple of times.

After Wash gets Richardson pointed in the right direction, the cane give way and he breaks through in a couple of steps. He’s a mess. Neither man speaks. Richardson gestures loosely back at the thicket as if trying to explain. Although Wash keeps his face smooth and blank as a stone, he nods then turns and Richardson follows him back to the barn. The horses rustle and blow but don’t call out.