Free Men (12 page)

ASLEEP IN THE
house is where they found me. I had been there enough days that I no longer knew how long. One of the men came with rye and asked me questions and I said nothing. Another man, and I said nothing, took a sack of coins from a hole in the fireplace. I didn’t know it was there. He left me bread. Then the men in simple clothes with plain hair, three of them, who kneeled to where I lay and touched my forehead with dry palms. They lifted me and I thought it was my father again, but backward, and I fought because I thought they would drown me. Only kin could kill me, I tried to say. They put me in the back of a cart and opened my mouth to spoon honey in. I tried
to spit it out but it stuck to my tongue, the backs of my teeth. Sweetness. I licked it off myself and swallowed. They swore they wouldn’t harm me.

“Will someone bury my father?” I asked.

I had tried once myself, but he was swaddled in flies. I stood some steps away and told him I was sorry for what I had done to his quilt. I slapped my face to show him he wasn’t wrong for hitting me.

They told me he was at peace.

“In the ground?”

We’d had dead men before. Men my father may have shot, though I didn’t see. He told me bodies haunt you if they’re not put well under. I could hardly lift the shovel, but I helped him. Scrabbled the dirt with my hands, heaping it out, heaping it back. We buried the men like my father buried his twisted sticks. Maybe too the
she
was there, the one that once belonged to us. Things died in the forest, and you had to put them under.

I didn’t want my father haunting me.

“In the ground?”

One of the men nodded, though he was looking off, and the other two drove the cart on. Out of the forest, away from the creek and the clearing and the still and the squirrel and the body.

AWAY FROM HOME
,
nothing looked like home. We were going south. Some trees and fields, but houses too. Long stretches with all-the-same plants. The hills went away. I’d peek sometimes, but mostly I slept and feigned to sleep until Savannah. Easier not to look. We stopped once at an inn for the night, though I was asleep when they carried me in. I didn’t get to see the cows I heard lowing. The mattresses were up on stilts. I thought they’d
swallow me, so soft. There was even a pot beneath my bed, as if they knew. In the morning, the men gave me tea in a leaf-thin cup. I didn’t break a thing.

It was hot afternoon, me still eyes-shut in the back of the cart, when we stopped. The house was long and wood, with a stick stuck in the roof and a smaller stick across it. The road rolled in clods of dirt. I looked ahead and behind and didn’t see anything else but that long house, like it had grown up from a seed with no company. They lifted me out again and I tried to ask.

“Where is this?” I said. It had been a long time since I’d spoke.

The man set me on my feet and took my hand. The others went ahead, walked the stone path between the prickly bushes. They looked such a long way away, knocking at the door. Someone came out. Everyone moved their hands. My hand was still in the man’s, which was sweaty. It was hot afternoon. Then there was nodding and the man started walking forward. My feet didn’t know to follow him. I tripped, and he waited. We stumbled that way to the wide board porch. I stood in front of a door wider than five of me, their hands on my arms now, calling me
orphan
. The one who took me was low and soft in long black robes and had a chest that ballooned toward me. I placed my hands upon it and pushed into its softness and when she chirped, I learned what a woman was.

The three men patted me and shook hands and bowed at the woman, who they named
Christian,
and the woman bowed, and then they turned back down the prickle path. I said, “Wait!”

“Where?” I said.

They turned and nodded, and the one who held my hand just waved. Why did it take three men to carry me here, and one
woman to take me? What was in her front to make it so soft? I pushed at it again. She grabbed my wrists in one hand and pulled me inside. It was dark and cool and the shadows moved.

She showed me the rooms where children slept, the room where children ate, and a big room where children put their hands together and thought about goodness. All children, no fathers. As we walked, we saw other women. Swathed in black robes, crows with belly-pale fish in their mouths. I was still six, and deathly scared. They flocked around the beds, in the halls. I saw them kneeling and striding, wings spread, chests bobbing. At night, they hunched over us and cawed in a language that was not our own. Most raised their eyes when walking, so I’d only see their underlashes. They did not smile, though some glowed. Women, if these were they, were not our kind. Women were not to be befriended, touched.

The other children were thin as stirring spoons, all named
orphan
too. Their eyes bulged like fish, caught by crows. My own hands trembled to feel. The husk beds, the white basins, the wavy windowed glass. The first night I curled into a pillbug on my bed, then saw the boy one over had wool. I peeled back his blanket, scurtled in with him, closed our woolen nest. I wrapped my arms around his middle and slept. Dreamed it was my father let me hold him so. In the morning, the boy kicked me in the stomach and screamed for the women. They bundled me away and plunged me in cold water and combed my hair for nits. They slapped my cheeks and fed me mashed corn and dressed me in shirt and breeches so small my legs could not bend enough to sit, so when I was weary of standing I lay down.

Each day before dawn came, we were forced onto knees, my seams split. The older boys chanted loud, and I mumbled along.
They all were addressing my father. I was some surprised but said, “Yes, Father, I hope you are well in heaven, hollow though you be.” We sang songs that sounded like moans. We ate from wooden bowls as the sun woke, then washed our ears and went to field. Cotton grew, and corn. Melon in the summer. No lazing here, no pausing to nap by firesides or gaze antward. I was not a farmer but a boy. I followed the one in front of me, who bent with pudgy hands for weeds. I thought to pull what he pulled, but he pulled them all before me. I walked close behind. Our work was twinned. We did this for not long—there were black men who did the rest. They were older and didn’t mind. We did it for our morals, is what I learned. After an hour of morals, we were inside again and at our lessons. I pulled my fingers up to count, but never knew what to call them. One, two, three, and stopped. The books I never figured. The other boys were all kinds of sizes but to the last they knew their letters. One would stand in front and say rhyming things, and another would sit at a desk and spell out loud, and another drew loops of lines on slate. Proud they were, to speak of things that made no sense. I thought them stupid.

“You’ll learn,” the teacher said.

“Learn what?” I said. I had never seen a man in the world say rhyming things. Not even the men with gold buttons carried slates in their coats. I saw no hope for these boys with their letters. I moved my mouth when we all recited, but nothing came out, and no one minded. No one minded, long as I remembered my father in the evenings.

One night I hated him. Or was afraid. The coldness of his hands returned to me, and I wanted shed of him. I bent down with the other boys and while they praised I cursed. “Damn
you, Father, damn you,” and when the master heard, my back grew bloody wings, stripes laid all across. Another boy stood and showed me how to speak and for his pains was given figs. I watched the juices in his mouth. I rolled my tongue into a curl. My back burned. His lips dribbled. “He is not my brother,” I thought. “He is not my father’s son.”

So I made no friends. None among the made-up kin would let me hold them.

There were girls too, things as small and straight as we. They rooted in their own rooms, bent above their own chores. Our broken clothes were given to them, sewn to be split again. Negroes shared the field with us, Indians brought meat and hides and went away with bundles. I was the only one who resembled myself. The only one still brought to tears by women’s breasts. Who’d never seen a kiss, could not guess the placing of lips to skin was kindness. There may have been others. I never asked. I never spoke. The matron crows would hum in foreign words. The negroes dipped their calls in something brown and wet so I couldn’t tell the sounds apart. The Indians barked deep. My father stopped listening. I took my bread as it came. When I was told to ask the Lord to differ us from evil, I asked myself. Myself answered, “Yes.”

Two girls were not negro or Indian or orphan. They lived in the attic, closest to heaven, and served our master and the crows. Brought and took dishes, helped with linens, sewed things with their young fingers. A girl with few teeth, who nightmared us all, and a girl with red hair. Children, but with parents somewhere. For a week they’d be gone, and we knew. They came back fatter, like they had slept sound, like someone had kissed their faces before sleep. The one who wasn’t ugly was beautiful. She didn’t walk but skipped. Everything was dancing,
and it was light, nothing like the men in my father’s cabin who pounded till the plates fell down. She talked with her hands, and they danced. Little fingers dancing. None of us knew her name.

There was a day when she cupped my chin and said, “Look at that face. Who was your mother, to leave you?”

I whispered. “My mother, I believe, is dead. I believe my father knocked her head.” A rhyme, though it was true.

One robed woman felt almost kind, and to her I gave my thoughts and whatever I found, the summer blackberry, the winter nest. She was mostly still, moved only if poked. Dry and old. Her cheeks hung in pockets. The day I brought her a dead mole, its dunness for her boned hand, she asked me what I hoped for, roundabout. “Where are you going after this world?” is what she asked.

“To the next to see my father.”

“And where is your father?”

“Asleep.”

“In heaven?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What will you do to get there?”

I hadn’t known there was a map. My head I lay on her hard thin legs and clutched her knees. The mole was on the ground. She hadn’t touched it. I watched its hand, stiff and scaled, grasping in its last breath, as she told me how to go.

“God loves those who love,” she said. She steered me from hitting, biting, from telling lies, from stealing rolls. She never said what love was. I dug my fingers in her leg, my eyes shut tight, till she pried them free.

As she stood to leave, her skirts hushing, I said, “You are who I love.”

Her pouched face hardened. “No. God is who you love.”

In bed beneath the summer linen, I wondered had I met a man named God. Or didn’t he care to meet me. What was love but a touch. My hands around her knees. His belt against my back. Love being warm fingers, hate being cold. God had no hands. When we woke at night, dream-sweated, we were meant to pray to fall asleep. I stopped praying. I wept instead.

ABOVE ALL THE
women was a man. Men I knew. He marked our comings and goings in a little gold book. In the belt around his robe lived a leather lash. He was a fancy man, who used his belt not for whippings but to hold a whipper. His nose was so long it almost touched his mouth, though I never saw his tongue come out to lick it. Some days he wasn’t there, some days he was. Mornings, he stood over prayer. With all our mouths mumbling, even the crows, he didn’t speak. He had wet eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was sad. The less I remember him, the more I think he was.

He brought me to his room once. Gave me a cross made out of sticks. I started, for I was no fool and knew about sticks. He smiled and opened up my fist. The sticks were smooth, all the nubbins worn off. When his eyes were closed and he was speeching, I looked about. A small room for a grown man. White walls, no dirt. A bed and a table and a jug. I was thirsty so I stepped over on soft toes. His eyes snapped open when I spit it all over the white wall.

“Stronger than my father’s,” I said for apology.

He kept staring, there on his knees with his hands together and his nostrils wide. I inched out.

I inched in again. “Thank you,” I said, holding up the cross. I ran.

When next I saw the woman my friend, I butted against her. She was washing plates in the yard. All the dirty water smelled of fat. Hungry, I gnawed soft on her arm. She pushed me away. She didn’t want my too-big shoes to get wet.

“Where do you make the whiskey?” I asked.

She looked like I had something foul on my face.

“I can help.” Though really I knew nothing. I couldn’t start a fire. Fires started in spite of me.

“We don’t drink whiskey, son,” she said. Me and Jesus were sons, and everyone else was a father. I told her about the jug of the long-nose man and she put her hand across my mouth and shook her head.

“We tell our own sins,” she said, “not others’.”

Sin
was not a word I knew.

Some of us were worse than I was. Would go down pondways on full moons and swim clothesless, boys and girls. Would drag their shirts back wet to bed. I followed them once, young as I was, and climbed a tree to stare. The red-haired girl was there, laughing. Their forms mirrored out in the night water. They pushed, they ducked, I thought they’d drown. I held to my branch and waited for ants. An owl hooted by and they gasped and dove, all bodies down. Bubbles surfaced and the girls’ hair. Wet mats of muddy brown and gold. Then they were serpents, dolphins. In lessons, they told us of the ocean, as if we’d seen it. We smelled it. The creek here ran straight to sea. There were boys who could swim it. But here the cattails shivered round the wallow, and we were in the middle of ourselves. No sea to see, no mountain, not even flatness. Just our bodies in the water, in the arm of the marsh. You could smell brine on the dusk wind. Beyond that edge was nothing human. A mile of swamp,
untouched. Unheld. The creeks snaking toward each other and darkness. To the ocean where dolphins flew.

The red-haired girl climbed out first, shook herself, saw me on the branch. “I’ve never seen a lizard like you,” she said, and twisted her hair in loops so the water seeped out. She put a finger to her lips. I nodded, and she laughed again. Danced back up the slope to the house that was not her home. Her head like a flicker of light.