Wash (47 page)

“What happened?”

All I did was lift one shoulder to say I don’t know exactly. Then I touched my right forefinger to my heart. I stood there looking at him, knowing he wouldn’t have nothing to say about it and he didn’t. He moved right on.

“Did he say where he wants to be?”

“It’ll take some doing.”

“I figured as much. Where is it?”

When I told him about the place, I saw right away he knew the spot. I watched him realize it was across his line, then I saw him decide Miller never needed to know. I didn’t have to say one word.

He brushed past me leaving the stall. Said he’d be back at full dark to help me take Wash out there. He’d ride Bolivar and use Omega to drag Wash behind him on some kind of sledge. Just like an Indian, he said.

But I’d need to ride astride to keep Omega steady. Once he had us situated, with the hole mostly dug, he’d leave me to it and then I’d ride Omega home when I was done. He talked about how Omega knew the way, like he forgot I did too.

Moon rose real late, like it knew we needed that time to slip past everybody. So many folks stayed crossways with Wash, we had to put him someplace where nobody else could ever find him. Nobody besides us.

Richardson

Even as I laid him down in the hole I’d dug, I had trouble believing Wash was gone. Losing my barn was one thing but losing Wash was another.

All I knew was, I couldn’t even look at him. Pallas had wrapped him in red and I was in a mighty hurry to cover him up, but as soon as I took my shovel to start laying the dirt back in, Pallas stopped me. Told me go home. Said she’d handle the rest.

I snatched up my reins and left but the whole ride home, all I wanted was to turn around and go back. Wash was holding my whole life, even as he lay under the ground, and I never knew it until now.

I’d always thought he was just like my own story. Both of them put here to serve me. Do what I told them to do. But they never ever did. Neither one of them.

I was so determined to believe what I’d been taught, that I had dominion. I never suspected it’s a dance. Of course Mena knew this part. And Emmaline. And Wash. They’d been taught too. But theirs was a very different story. And why in the world should they tell it to me? I wouldn’t have been able to hear them either.

I hovered in the shady shallows of my story for years, insisting on my own version, thinking I could arm myself with words. But as I sat in my darkening barn, drinking and telling Wash everything I had intended for my life, I could not stop the flow of pictures rising up from underneath. I finally started telling him the truth but never when I was sober enough to remember it. I’d made Wash carry it all and now he was gone, dragging my story with him.

I never dreamed the truth was what I needed. That my failures and my mistakes might be the very gifts I had to give, whether my descendants ever choose to accept them or not. And I never dreamed I’d be caught here till my truth was told. That we’d all be caught here together until this story finds itself finished with us. All of us. As unbelievable as that may seem.

∞

It is full winter again and again until Richardson is finally old and in bed, fed up with the doctors and deeply irritated by his death taking so long. He opens his eyes to Pallas bending over him. He can’t move much but he runs his eyes down her long thin neck to her bony collarbones. The dip between them where the skin thins enough for him see her pulse surging slow and steady underneath.

She looms between him and the bright windows then she sits by his bed, her face thrown into deep shadow. The darkness blurs her features so he can talk to her as if she is not there, just a silhouette. Nobody but a listener. He has been missing that since Wash passed.

Too much chittering goes on around here. Too much talking back. Having raised his children to have strong opinions has worn him out. He needs some peace and quiet so he can hear himself think.

Most times he lies there looking out the window. But sometimes he’ll start in on some question he can’t seem to find the answer for, hunting clarification even as he suspects there’s none to be found. What Memphis should have done. What all he had intended. Wanting his position to be understood. By Pallas if no one else. But most of the time, he just watches his life drift through his mind, floating like skeins of thread in dye water, with no idea where to start untangling.

Richardson tells Pallas not to worry. He has made provisions. He’s bought her from Miller and written her into his will. She cannot be sold off. He has made both Cassius and Quinn promise him. He only hopes they are good for their word. And he has put her in the cabin at the foot of his driveway for good. That way she’ll be easy to get to for those who need tending.

The dispatch in his tone catches her breath in her throat but once she takes a minute to think about this new situation, she calms herself. You never know what will happen, might as well let yourself be glad when what comes along turns out to be something you can manage.

She settles back in her chair as he starts explaining why he is not freeing her, or any of his for that matter, on his deathbed. Not only does he not believe in it, he can’t afford it. He doubts his boys would carry out his wishes anyway. He tells her that freeing negroes is more complicated than it seems. Even Washington had tried but he’d caused nothing but trouble.

Pallas can only shake her head each time she witnesses the true craziness of some white folks. With Richardson, if his mouth does not form the words and tell them to somebody, then the thought itself never crossed his mind. No wonder white folks think if something never gets told, then it didn’t happen. No wonder they keep filling up this world with every single thing they ever thought about, just like God doesn’t know it all already.

Still, sitting there listening is not too bad for her in some kind of way. Despite the fact there are plenty of other folks she could be helping, people who are still living instead of lying here trying to die, Pallas reminds herself that shepherding somebody out of this world, even this man, is doing something too. Besides, Richardson seems so lost he makes her feel found and she likes thinking about the past. She misses it and the people in it. As exasperating as he can be, this old man is one of the last ones around who remember most of what she remembers. He even knew Phoebe.

It makes her smile to think about Wash having to put up with him. And back when he was worse. Much worse. Lord have mercy. She can see Wash sitting there in that barn, leaning his back against the wall, twirling his piece of straw, sitting just as still as he was lying in his grave, with Richardson’s words pouring over him, rising up around him till he has to swim through them, making him feel lucky that Mena taught him how. Richardson talked so much, Wash said seemed like he could float in it. Just like those waves.

Sometimes Richardson will get to talking about his lines. Horses. Hounds. Negroes. All the lines he has made. Their fineness. Their lasting quality.

Pallas listens closely to this part because she was only able to look at that book for a little while before Wash burnt it up. All of it gone before she’d had time to get everything nailed down good in her mind’s eye. She is glad of the chance to sit there by Richardson’s bed, dipping her washcloth and wringing it out to lay it on his forehead, listening to him shape his mouth around all those words, all those names of all those women she knew, all those names of all those babies she had pulled into this world, with all of it leading back to Wash, coming together in Wash, passing through Wash as through the eye of a needle and then opening back out again on the far side of him into a giant shimmering net, linking him to all those who had come before him and who would come after him. His mamma and his daddy and their mammas and their daddies and cousins and uncles and grands and great grands, with her being the only one living and breathing and walking in this particular world who knows about all of them for sure.

Just like Wash said, if you’ve got any kind of thin skin, you can feel all these spirits hovering all around you. Everybody who has been here and gone. But it is harder to get the details without somebody to tell you. And you need the details. Who’s who. What they had looked like, how they had talked and walked and laughed.

With Wash’s people, she’d never seen any of them with her own eyes except for Mena, and neither had Wash, but he laid them into her mind as clear as a picture, just like his mamma had laid them in his. That auntie of his daddy’s with the big front teeth, a rawboned lanky woman with a kind of a donkey laugh, her head thrown back and her hand slapping down. Those pictures have been laid well enough in Pallas’s mind till she can recognize people she’s never even met and she has the sense to thank God for that.

Same with Richardson. She had sat there with him while his daddy died, and then his son too, and now she sits here next to him as he gets ready to go. She knows he does not want to go like his daddy did. Struggling and afraid. An orphan all over again. She can see it starting to dawn on him that he has already spent too much of his life that way and this should be different. He wants to go calm.

When the flu comes back, this time Richardson knows it’s going to take him and he’s glad. He lies there in his bed by the window, resting his eyes on Pallas and she lets him. Sitting there in the rocker right by his knee, looking out the same window but at a different angle. Their fields of vision overlap. Nothing left to say. Feels like days pass that way but it’s really only two. So peaceful and quiet between the coughing.

Richardson has her call Emmaline’s youngest grandson. Nelson is just a little older than Lucius was when he died and almost as good a draftsman as William had been at that age. Nelson brings a pad of paper because Richardson has had him draw designs out for him before. Says he has a good eye.

He tells the boy pine. A pine box is what he wants and this is how he wants it. Simple and plain. And the headstone plain too. No epitaph. Just the dates, under his name. Under the trees. Near his brother David and next to Lucius, leaving room for his wife and the rest of them.

Nelson draws it all out for him. The coffin, the headstone, even the trees. Richardson nods, pleased, and falls back asleep. He wakes to cough and then sleeps again. Pallas dozes in her chair and Nelson snores softly where he sits on an old trunk, leaning asleep against the wall.

In the bustle of activity surrounding Richardson’s last bout of coughing early that next morning, there is confusion. Mary rushes in, finally able to take over from Pallas now that Richardson can no longer intervene. As she jerks on a choking Richardson, trying to lift him so he can breathe, she sends Nelson out of the room in a rush. The small notepad full of his drawings falls behind the trunk where he’d been sitting when he fell asleep the night before.

Pallas knows from the way Richardson pulls against Mary’s arm and looks over toward her that he wants Pallas to make Mary lay him back down on the bed and let him go, like they did his father. But Mary won’t have it. Pallas stands back by the wall holding his gaze until it’s over because that is what she can do.

Death always comes as a surprise. So much happens so fast and yet each single day stretches endlessly. Cassius sits with his mother, writing out an inventory of the estate so debts can be paid, credits collected and taxes determined. Together they parcel out what goes to whom. Land and lots, furniture, books, animals, farm equipment, negroes. What and who will be given to which family member, who will be sold, and who will be hired out to provide income for the rest, especially Mary Patton. Then they have the big fancy funeral Richardson no longer wanted.

Cassius runs the place with Quinn at his right hand. After one mojo incident too many, they decide to dig up what they had always assumed was just trash piled up under those first cabins Richardson built. They send everybody to the fields for the day and wonder why they linger.

Before the sun has even started down from noon, Cassius and Quinn find stones, bones and shells. Even knives and one old gun. Everybody denies knowing anything, but here’s the proof Quinn never could find for Richardson, lying right underfoot all this time, buried safe as a secret where he had never thought to look.

Cassius starts that same day, burning down the old to rebuild his way. One cabin at a time. Each raised off the ground on its own four blocks. He tells each family to sleep in the barn for the week, then keep that new cabin clean. Says if he can’t see daylight under the stairs, he’ll burn it down again, no matter who’s inside.

He tells the swelling ranks of abolitionists to come and see for themselves. Conditions are much improved. After having seen what ambivalence had done to both his father and his brother William, Cassius will have none of it. The young slaveholders of his generation do not remember the window that opened during and after the Revolution. They know nothing about some Founding Fathers’ ill fated attempts to stamp out the trade and they care even less. After faltering for years, slavery takes the bit in its teeth and runs.

It will be the buying and selling of negroes that finally energizes the town of Memphis. The growth in cotton production will drive the prices for negroes so high that Nathan Bedford Forrest will become a Memphis millionaire before he ever signs up to fight in the Civil War. While Richardson died thinking his dream of a city high on the bluffs of the broad Mississippi River was a dismal failure, William will live long enough to wish it had been.