All True Not a Lie in It (46 page)

I eat again. I do not know what it is that I eat, meat or metal or earth. It is still dark, my throat is rough as hot sand. Daddy’s anvil pounds unevenly in my skull, clang clang clang. A little red Daddy banging away. I am very little and my bed is hard and hot. I think of my sister Bets and my little brothers Neddy and Squire. I think we are very sick together.

A slow thought wraps itself about me. A slow word takes time to spell itself out. My finger is tracing the letters, trying to catch them in the air. My finger is bewildered. I concentrate until my head aches further. I can never finish the word, it never finishes.

P-O-I-S

P-O-I-S

P-O-I-S-O

This is what it says. It does not finish. I am busy down a deep hole, I am clay. My moving finger is drying clay, it is going stiff. I am dry. I will crack right through. What is inside?

Straw stuffing.

There is nothing else here, I am so low in the hole. Nothing to see or hear. But I am listening. My eyes are open in the clay of my face. My tongue hurts all the way along. I keep very still but my bones vibrate and clack, the dark muffles the noise. But there was a word, a word in the dark. My mouth reaches back for it and tries for the sound. It comes up with Guh. Guh. What was it? Gone. Possibly so.

All moves backward now, there is no forward. A smell of wolf. Wolf’s stomach. This is where I am again, then. I sigh and sink and the stinking wolf stomach cradles me in pieces. And I am so glad.

But the word will not let me be.

I flap my baby wings a little, this is the way my arms feel, weak as a new chicken’s wings fresh out of the egg. They hurt to move, they hurt to unbend. I am trying to pull myself up out of the wolf’s
gut and its gullet, out of its throat and over its lolling tongue. The smell is sharper here, and the gate of the teeth is sharp.

I am crawling across the dirt floor looking for water. The sound of my legs dragging is a harsh sound.

I have kept it off, but I cannot here this night. Now it comes, it screams up:
Jamesie
. I cannot see him. He is down inside the wolf. He hides his face in the dark with his torn arm. I cannot see him. He will not speak to me, and my heart drains inside me.

In his place another shrills out of the black, it is Jemima.
Daddy, Daddy!
—Her face is white inside her curtains of black hair, her eyes burn as she shrieks.
I knew you were coming
. Her mouth is open, shrieking, black, empty. Seeing her face, I stand stock still and I am afraid. My famous daughter’s face, my poor girl. It retreats suddenly, leaving only a pale print on the dark, as my brother Israel’s did. My ghosts.

The thought strikes me as it must. I have been trying to run from it but here it is in my face: Jemima, dead like Jamesie and like Israel, having joined the dim ranks that I can only try to reach. Is she? Are you? Jemima. Is the fort gone? I have sometimes wished it to be. Everyone gone with it. All burned, all turned to ash and air, floated away in all directions. Everything gone.

Rebecca, are you living, and my girls and my boys? I cannot read you, I cannot read. Now I see Israel standing with his arm out and covered in sitting birds, which give me directions, but their language is sly nonsense, their eyes are beady lies. The face of Israel’s lovely dead wife flashes at me and is gone. These signs mean nothing to me. When she was teaching me to read and write better, I felt like this, like being blind and cursing my state every minute of my life.

And at once I do see it, all the signs snapping and locking into sense, all thick black lettering:
Everything is gone
. They are all gone, all dead together. Their faces drifting off. My heart aches and aches,
it is stripped clean and robbed. For a moment I believe that now I will catch my boy among these dead, I will see him, see a brilliant picture of his face, even for an instant.

I drag myself along, only myself.

At the door is a shadow deeper than the others. I know it is Death. It has a shape, a face, a mouth. A long face, a smiling mouth. It opens the mouth, it can talk. Death has his face, of course. His hollow eye sockets and cheeks and smile. I gasp the name: Cherokee Jim.

I want to weep. I have kept it away for so long, though it has always been with me. The long sad face. I stare at it and I say: Why? Why did you kill him that way? You could have adopted him as Black Fish did with me. He was a good son, he was better than I am. You did not have to use him as a sign to the rest of us, you did not have to make such a poor piece of writing paper of him.
Keep Off
.

I expect to be dead in a moment, if I am not already. The short hairs on the sides of my head are up on end, my whole skin is screaming. I am alive. The pain smashes me. I stagger to my screaming feet and with all my breath I say: Cherokee Jim. Big Jim. I know Jamesie said it also. It is the wrong name, it is a false name, but what else is there to say?

The face can talk but it chooses not to. It has the same old easy manner it always did, the ease of ownership and certainty, like Hill’s and Russell’s. Stupidly I hold out the silver ring to it, the dented trinket. I feel it wanting to laugh. I know that I will get no answer. Answers do not come when you wish for them. They come later in curious forms you do not recognize.

Now I only want him to be gone. I raise my arm, I will chop him down like a tree. I cannot look at him, I am sobbing, I have no breath. But he will not go. He puts a hand on my arm and presses me back to the ground. He crouches beside me where I lie, he touches my head. It is a gentle enough touch. He says:
I told you to stay where you were. You did not listen. You kill me, I kill you. We make our trades
.

Or perhaps he does not say any of it, perhaps this is what I imagine he would say. I do hear other words, they tunnel down into my bristling head:

—What is your dream?

A
BLADE
is moving above my face.

I am awake and not dead. When I shift myself, I expect my body to ache as it would after a fight, but it does not. My head is clear and still attached. The ring is still in my hand. I rub my jaw and it is oddly smooth.

Delilah draws the knife over my cheekbone towards my eye. It catches and rasps and I feel a small cut opening. Then up and over my skull it goes. I can feel the short hairs lifting and being cut away. For some time I listen, I turn my head with her hand when she pushes it. The knife scrapes gently over and over.

—Did you poison me?

She is dipping the knife, it clanks dully against the wooden bowl of water.

—Did you come and ask what I was dreaming? It is not your affair.

The knife rolls. Still she says nothing.

—Ha. I will tell you in any case. I saw Death, if that was your intention.

My head lightens further. I am exhausted and cleaned out. I have seen Death’s face at last. I saw what Jamesie saw. This is what I have wanted. I have seen the very worst thing. I have seen that the rest
must be gone. Rebecca, Jemima, all of you boys, all of you. My bones have turned into birds’ bones, all hollow and light. I have a curious feeling of having been rescued, though I am still in the prison house. It is very curious.

—Delilah. Did my father order it? If he is still my father, that is to say. Or Pompey?

Her arms are still for a moment. I have the sense that it was all her doing. She says:

—I told you the meat was from the day before. Maybe you needed to be poisoned, to see such a thing.

She gets to her feet. She opens the door. I see the little girl watching in the gap. She steps in and presses a finger over the nick on my cheekbone. Then she looks at the blood printed on her fingertip. Holding it high she leaves. For a moment the door is open. The air is fresh and warm and the sky is paler as though it is a different place, a different year.

My mother’s eyes are full of tears again. She is still my mother. She will not touch me but she cannot keep from looking at me and calling me son,
Niequeetha
, and something else related to eggs. Fresh Egg perhaps, or Egg Head. She does not call me Sheltowee. But she is trying.

My young sisters skulk outside in the twilight, peering through the bark in their old way and hoping for something interesting. There is no sign of the wolf pup, perhaps they have done away with it.

The pot over the fire is smoking. My mother’s tears travel in lines down the sides of her nose. I say:

—May I help you, Mother?

She smiles and blinks, more tears spill. She pulls herself up. She speaks to me soft as if I were her true son whom she has known all along:

—No woman’s work. You say this always.

—Where is my father?

She looks at me intently. Her eyes cross my face and double back again. She says:

—My son. You are sad tonight.

—Well Mother, you have found me out.

—Why?

I bow from the waist, I rub the side of my bare head. I say:

—I do not know. Perhaps the moon. Perhaps I am getting old. An old turtle—

She cuts in:

—You think of your whites. Your white family. Children and wife.

I am surprised. The cooking pot is overflowing with smoke, but she makes no move to stir it even when an evil bubble erupts from it. She only looks upward. There is the moon hanging over the hole, I see it too, a pale fruit hazy in the smoke. She weeps for a few moments, she wipes her forearm across her eyes. She breathes tears. I wish I had some helpful thing to say, any words.

She clears her throat and coughs out a clog. She takes up her spoon and says heavy as if she is tired of saying it:

—My son. When you bring them to live with us, they will be your family also.

—They are gone now. Gone.

I know it as I say it.

The dinner is so burnt there is no hope for it.

The guard Kaskee, with a crop of fresh pimples, smiles straight in my face. I sit up and crack my forehead on his jaw. He yelps and flails backwards and makes to hit me but I catch his wrist and I try to laugh:

—Back again, my old friend. Life rolls along.

I am glad to see him. The wigwam is otherwise empty. No Black Fish. I have not seen him since they let me out.

The young guard looks at me, a mixture of murder and resignation. He pulls me towards the door. My forehead stings somewhat, which is no consolation to him, as I can see.

We walk up the street. A few boys are about, kicking a leather ball against a house and chasing an elderly dog back and forth with sticks. The dog throws itself down wheezing in the middle of the street. We step over it. The children scatter and group again and follow us like mayflies.

Before we reach the river, I see the two figures side-by-side. They look like preachers set to outdo one another. Or like judges. Their faces are bland as judges’ faces. They say:
You will have to guess what I can do with you
. At once I am struck with a thought of my piles of debts behind me, my bankruptcies, magistrates I have stood looking up at.

It is Pompey with Black Fish. Seeing my father for the first time now, I am relieved. They are waiting for me. The guard walks me down towards them. The river is fuller now, moving quickly and rolling over in places, the sun flashing on it. A broken log is jammed against rocks, its inside shows yellow and torn. I think of that old dog lying in the street wheezing. The children have gone, perhaps they have returned to kick it and make it move off and kick it again.