Chaneysville Incident (35 page)

And they caught it up then, fumbling a little as they found their way into a key that would accommodate them all, finding it and settling and strengthening:

“In bright mansions above,

In bright mansions above,

Lord, I want to live up yonder

In bright mansions above.”

When the song died there was a silence, and Uncle Bunk moved through it, limping back to his place among them. The white men were looking confused, not sure what would happen next, lost without a printed order of service. But the rest of them waited patiently. For the spirit.

It came from among the women this time, through Aunt Emma Hawley, no words, just the thread of a song rising, in the old call:

“I looked over Jordan and what did I see…”

And they slipped in with the response:

“Comin’ for to carry me home?”

The voices strong and steady, taking even the call away from her, doing it in unison:

“But a band of angels comin’ after me,

Comin’ for to carry me home.”

And then the chorus, which even the white men knew, having probably sung it half-drunk at a lodge meeting:

“Swing low, sweet chariot,

Comin’ for to carry me home…”

When the song died, we stood in silence. Waiting. And then she came forward, surprising me, not because she came—she hadn’t planned this part, but she knew how it went—but because there were tears on her cheeks.

“I had a husband,” she said, “and I have a son. This man was a brother to my husband. Walked with him, and talked with him. Saved his life, more than once. Saved him for me. I owe this man for that.”

“Amen,” they said.

“And this man was a father to my boy. Taught him things I couldn’t teach him. Showed him things I couldn’t show him.” She turned her head far to the right, looking straight at me. “I didn’t like that. It made me fear. It still makes me fear, sometimes.” She looked back at the rest of them. “But he loved my son. And he taught him the things he taught him because that was what he believed a man should know. He taught him because he loved him.” She paused then, for a moment, but we knew she was not finished. “ ‘And Jesus said unto him, Feed my lambs.’ ”

“Amen,” they said.

And then she began her song:

“Oh, sooner in the morning when I rise,

The young lambs must find the way

With crosses and trials on every side

The young lambs must find the way.”

It was not a song I knew, and not one that most of them were familiar with; and the singing of the response and the full chorus was a little tentative and thin. But they found the words inside them somewhere:

“Oh, the old sheep done know the road,

The old sheep done know the road,

The old sheep done know the road,

The young lambs must find the way.”

And when they were done she gave me one look and went back to her place.

It should have been me then, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t think of anything to say. But they waited, calmly, patiently, not hurrying, as if they had all the time in the world. Then there was a little stirring, not much, among the ranks of the white men. For a moment I feared it would be Scott, seizing the time to make one of his speeches. But it wasn’t; it was the Judge. His voice, clearly an alien one, rose. I resented it; I knew too much about him, or suspected it, anyway, not to. But there was nothing I could do but listen. At least he surprised me. From him I would have expected the Bible. But it was Tennyson:

“Death closes all; but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs; the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.”

He turned his head and looked at me, and he, too, began, giving the age-old call:

“Gonna lay down my burden…”

and getting the response, strong, quick:

“Down by the riverside, down by the riverside,

Down by the riverside.”

And then they did something odd—they dropped away and let him carry the call solo, as if he were one of them:

“Gonna lay down my burden…”

And came in again, just as strongly, behind him:

“Down by the riverside,

I ain’t gonna study war no more.”

I did not sing with them. I was trying to think. Because I had to say something; had to: there was no more time. But I was too cold. I had drunk four strong toddies before the service, but still I was shivering, from the cold and the doubt; I had to speak, but I could not imagine what to say.

But when the song died someone else stepped forward: Linda Jamison. She came all the way to the grave, her steps light and easy despite the muddy ground, all the way to the grave. She turned to face them. “This man saved my children,” she said. “They was sick, burnt up with fever in the middle of the summer. I had a doctor come—he give ’em pills and said for me to make ’em drink cold water and bathe them with cool cloths, to keep the fever down. That was easy for him to say; he had himself a Frigidaire. All I had was a spring. And I met this man here, the one you all used to call a heathen, while I was tryin’ to haul water across from that spring fast enough to keep it cool. He never said a word to me, never even called my name, but he carried those buckets home for me, and then he went away. When he come back he was carryin’ a hundred pounds of ice. He carried it all the way from town. He still never said a word. But he came back that evening with another hundred pounds of ice. I set up all night, bathin’ my babies. Some folks come around, thought I should leave that an’ take care a some other business. And maybe I would have. Maybe I woulda left my babies alone for just a little while—I never was no saint, nor much of a mother, either. But I was that night. Because that man who wouldn’t even call my name cared enough about my babies to bring that ice to me, and I couldn’t do no less. In the morning he come with more ice, and in the evening too. And that night he come and sat beside me, and he bathed my babies with cool water—he used those hands you all always said was so damn dirty. Maybe they was dirty. But he used ’em, and he stayed awake when I dozed off, and in the morning my babies’ fevers broke. I told him thank you. He didn’t say a word; he just went away. But every time one of my girls was sick he found out some way, and he come and brought whatever he thought they needed; and he give me money. He never said what for, but I knew; he give me money so I wouldn’t have to leave my children just because somebody come wantin’ a little pleasure. I’ll never forget that. And when he was sick, I went to see if I could help him. But he didn’t want help from me, or anybody on this Hill, either. He didn’t want help at all. All he wanted was to see one boy that grew up over here and went away like anybody else with sense. He didn’t think that boy would come back. But he did come back.” She turned her head and looked at me. “God bless him,” she said. She looked down at the grave a moment, and then she raised her eyes and looked at them standing there on the slope. “God bless ’em both,” she said, “and to hell with all of you.”

I heard them gasp a little, and heard the silence as she walked back to her place, but it was all right then. I stopped trying to think; I went on impulse and said the words that came. I saw the preacher’s head rise, his face take on a puzzled expression, because what I was saying sounded biblical; it
was
biblical, but not their Bible.

“O death, how bitter it is to remember you for a man at peace among his goods, to a man without worries, who prospers in everything, and still has the strength to feed himself. O death, your sentence is welcome to a man in want, whose strength is failing, to a man worn out with age, worried about everything, disaffected and beyond endurance. Do not dread death’s sentence; remember those who came before you and those who will come after….”

And then, just when the words moved into the wrong stream, saying things I did not want to say, there were others:

“In their descendants there remains a rich inheritance born of them. Their descendants stand by the covenants and, thanks to them, so do their children’s children. Their offspring will last forever, their glory will not fade….”

There was more to that too, but it wasn’t right, but the words I wanted were there, in my mind; and this time I knew why I wanted them:

“I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me. My mother’s sons have turned against me, and bade me tend their vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept….”

I was finished then, and I stood for a moment, searching for a song. But before I could sing it, the song came from somewhere, the old slave call to clandestine worship or desperate escape:

“Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus;

Steal away, steal away home,

I ain’t got long to stay here.”

And humming it gently, without signal or ceremony they softly stole away.

The cabin stank of dying.

One of the world’s most powerful smells, and one of the most ineffable. And intolerable. So after I got the fire going and the four galvanized buckets filled with water and set on the stove, I took down the wooden shutters that blocked the openings that served for windows, and I hauled the bedding out into the clearing, made sure it was downwind, doused it with kerosene, and set it alight. Then I went back in and began to take things off the shelves. By the time I finished that, the water was boiling. I poured strong industrial-strength detergent into a bucket and, with a long-handled brush made to spread tar, proceeded to scrub down the walls.

I did it three times, leaving the last bucket of water to wash the implements, the tin dishes and cups, the pots and skillet, the trappings that a man builds up over years of living. The things I couldn’t wash I wiped with damp rags. I oiled what needed to be oiled. And then I put everything back on the shelves, just as he had had it, his fishing gear and hunting gear and tools, his cooking utensils and the jars of food that were left. I got more water and set it to heat. Then I began to bring things over the ridge.

The job was difficult but not particularly time-consuming; by early afternoon I had the supplies on the shelves and the clothes hung on pegs, my old deer rifle racked and the new army cot made up with new blankets and set up against the far wall. The only things I could not neatly stow were the few books I had brought with me for reference, and my pads and cards and pens, and the two cases of bourbon, and the folio. The books I set on the floor. The rest of my equipment I set on the table. The bourbon I left on the floor near the stove. I did not know what to do with the folio. In the end I put it on the table too.

I put the shutters back in place and lit the lamp. The water was warm and I filled the old tin and sat in it, sipping a toddy and thinking of things I had forgotten. Lime. I would have to lime the outhouse. And maybe get some flagstones for the clearing, to make it a little less swampy. And I would need to rope the path; the storm would not stay stalled forever. And I would have to write to Judith.

When I finished my bath I dried with one of the new towels and put on a pair of sweat pants and a sweat shirt. (They weren’t new; they were Bill’s.) Then I made myself a strong toddy and settled down at the table.

For a long time I did nothing except sit and look at the folio and think, trying to decide something very simple: did I want to use the white cards or the colored ones? Simple, but important: for more than fifteen years the white cards had been reserved for recording the doings of Moses Washington. Finally I decided to use them to record the information contained in the documents Moses Washington had constructed his final fiction to protect, because he thought them valuable. He had been right; they were valuable. Any historian would say so. For they were the raw stuff of history: handwritten autobiography, drafts of published pamphlets, day-by-day journals. But Moses Washington had not really been a historian; at any rate, he had not cared about history. To him the papers were valuable because they told the story of a fugitive slave who had risen to social prominence, who had been both author and outlaw, gentleman and murderer, husband and whoremaster, and whose blood, he believed, flowed in his veins.

I opened the folio and took them out. I went through them. I took my time, not reading, but looking at each item carefully. I stopped when I got to the map. I looked at it a long time, memorizing it. It was an old map—it showed the County in perhaps 1830, when there were few enough farms for each name to have been printed on the map itself. And written in were lines and symbols designating, I believed, escape routes and redoubts and caches of food and perhaps weapons. Those were in black ink. There were other marks, in blue ink, marks that, I believed, showed the places where grain mash had been fermented, and whiskey distilled and casked and hidden. And then there was another mark, in faded red. I was certain I knew what it was for, what place it set apart: a man had died there. I thought I knew how he had died; I wondered if I was ever going to figure out why. I wondered if I—not the historian, but I, whoever I was—really wanted to know.

I stopped then and rose and stretched and made myself another toddy, hot and strong. I sipped it slowly and made another. Then I went to work with my fountain pen and my india ink and my cards, going through the documents and leeching out single events, tearing them away from the other events that surrounded them, recording them in bare, simple, declarative form on the white lined cards, in a hand as precise and unemotional as I could make it. I dated each one carefully, as precisely as I could, with a string of digits—year, month, date—in the upper-left-hand corner. Then each one was an incident. A single event placed precisely in history, but apparently free of any cause. For this is what one must do if one would understand: one must forget apparent causes, ignore apparent motivations. For things are rarely as simple or as complicated as they appear, and the only truth—and that only a degree of truth—lies in the simple statement of the incident: in the year of our Lord 1948 a child was born to Yvette Stanton Washington, wife of Moses Washington. One would say it that way because one can be convinced, but never absolutely certain, that a woman’s husband is the father of her child.