Free Men (13 page)

In my watered thoughts, I fell asleep. I could almost hear the creeping of the children, their sloshed footsteps in August dirt. But I could not open my eyes. My branch was my father, my arms held close. In my dreams I was walking hand in hand, him in one, death in the other. I think it was the mole. Its hand was furred. I woke to not a wren but an angry blackbird, her hands clapping in the air beneath me, yelling damnation, cold breakfast. I crawled down and didn’t speak. I traced the footprints of the night demons, their toes still spread in the muck. I got no dinner but welts, no supper but a dark small room. I was left to sorrow and to pray. I thought of sins, but they were not my own. I thought mostly of the water, wondering could I swim if taught. I thought it was something like running. Only you must do it faster than the water runs downward, for at the bottom was nothing but more water, and deep. When the other children huddled to bed, I was put to mine and told to pray. The one who once seemed kind said, “And think what could’ve snatched you in that tree,” so I knew she was kind again. I thought about what could have snatched me, hawks and foxes and mice, till I fell asleep, dreamless.

WHEN I WAS
ten and older than some, a man came to find me. Men had taken others. We weren’t to live there forever, our feet
kicking the same waters. They trained us to hire us to discard us. We were not forsaken, we were sold. He was shorter than my father and thicker and his arms bulged. He had a nose red from drinking. Cheeks tight as plums. Dark bristle beard that I touched the first night he fell asleep before me. I stood in the morning room and said I would not go. The bony woman I thought was kind stood behind the master, who shook his head.

“Brother Sterrett is a good man,” he said.

I had no brothers. I took off my shoes and held them in my hands. I said I would not go.

“He has a child, a boy your own age. He’s a physician and will teach you to be a good assistant.”

I thought he looked like a grave robber. “I want for no more teaching,” I said and hugged my shoes against my chest. I had been there four years now. Four years more of learning, or not learning. Of counting all the bad I did so I could tell my master in confession. I stood on one side of the wooden closet, and he on the other. I saw his lash when I closed my eyes. This is how I remembered to call him father.
I said God’s name out loud
. I’d press my hands together, formal.
I bit my bedmate. I stole Sister’s apple. I have wished I were not here.
I said many prayers to wash away the bad. He’d bless me, but he didn’t love me. This was his punishment for me, this man.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked at the master. “I won’t do it again.”

“This is a blessing,” he said. When he tried to smile, his lip caught in a twist. “Brother Sterrett is sent to you from God.”

The visitor shifted on his feet and pulled his beard once. This I did not believe. I was not so unlearned. God didn’t know who I was. I looked at Brother Sterrett. He looked down. He knew
Master was lying. The red-haired girl opened the door and on seeing us shut it with a laugh. She had come for the breakfast tray. I heard her steps as they changed from wood to earth. If I turned my head, I would see her spinning in the field. My feet were cold. I said again I would not go. The master begged his pardon. Said, “Return tomorrow. He will be ready then.” I shook my head and let the crow pull me from the room.

I could not tell if we were damned or saved. They did not make that clear. If what my body did mattered. Forgiveness, though, was like a wheel going round. My body moved out into darkness, my body moved back in. As long as it got on the wheel in time. In time being before my body died.

Every house I went to was worse, and so I would not go to his. At his house I would die, no time to confess, and go to hell, and there I would see my father, and not wanting to see my father yet because of fear, I wanted to live instead. I would not be taken by a false brother. What I had learned in four years of not learning is that there are such things as women, and they are the ones that hold and men are the ones that punish, and if I had to leave a home again, I wouldn’t be riding in the cart of another man. I would take my own self. Run away with my own self. Whatever I did to save my body would be all right, just more for the sorry wheel to carry away.

After prayer that night, we rustled into beds. When the candles were guttered, I slipped away, nothing to carry. The long hall was dark. My soft feet noisy down the stairs. I paused to see all the empty space. The morning room, at night, was empty. A light marked the desk where children were entered into books. The master’s pen across the page. I crept to the desk to see the candle. If I knew my letters, I would open the book and find my
name and cross it out, one thin line. No one would take me but myself, though if only someone would want me. I tried not to cry and my trying-not-to-cry made the master’s candle toss. I sucked back in my breath, and the flame went still. This would light my way. My hands took his candle in its silver stand. It felt like a body in my hand, still burning. It would show me where my steps should go. Would light me to a house with a woman inside who would hold me and cover me in blankets.

I heard a step above. The women were walking. A door opened. I started. An upstairs voice. The candle with me, I turned and ran. I followed the afternoon path of the serving girl into the night darkness. Out of the morning room. Down the hall. Across the board porch, and into grass. Grass for miles. I stumbled and was caught by the furrows of a tulip tree. In the darkness I crouched, my arms across my face. My ankle hurt. I wanted to sleep. Maybe I could wait. The brother who was no relation would come and go, and Master would come out and find me here, would speak to Jesus who saw everything, who knew the hearts of every man, right down to the lilies, which are just another kind of man, and Master would bend down to me and his lash would be missing and he’d say, “Son, I would not give you to another. I would not leave you, not even for the shadow of the valley. Not once more will I stroke this lash on your skin,” and I would say, “I do not mind the lash, for I am a sinner, like you said.”

I dreamed, and my heart slowed, and when my eyes opened, the darkness was alight. The house, my home, the wide wood walls were flaming.

My candle was nowhere. Not in my hand.

It was in the stairs, in the hall, dropped and hungry. The sky
was burning. I had not meant to leave it. In the fleeing, I had dropped my fire and the house had caught it. Bodies were running out like ants.

I stood and walked to the marsh pond. I crawled into the water from the dock and hugged the post, my body floating out behind me. Here the water, dark and spangled, matched the night. Only the cattail tips were lit with pink. The smoke still faint. I held and buoyed and might have slept. Sleeping is a comfort. Not just for the tired. The shouts and slosh of buckets were too distant now, nothing to be heard but frog yells and lake water lapping on the bank. There was no sound but nature made. I told my body to still itself, would have let my wicked hands go except they were the only thing holding on. From there, I could not see the house crashing down.

IN THE MORNING
they found me cold and white in the pond, a floating fish. My arms had held. I had not drowned. They bundled me back and lay me in the cow barn, where beds of boys spread end to end. The girls slept with the sheep. I listened to their talk of us. I ran when others ran, is what they said, afraid as any other. All redeemed, no harm, except the one.

“What one?” I asked, and someone said a girl, the one who brought us tea and breakfast. Red-haired, who slept in the attic and had so far to come. Down the narrow wooden stairs, down two stone sets more. Farther than the others. Just a serving girl who couldn’t save herself. I nodded.

“Where is she?” I asked. They touched my shoulder and said it again.

But, I wanted to know, was she damned or was she saved? If no one blamed me it was not my fault. And no one blamed me.

I waited for her to twirl into the cow barn. I asked the other boys to tell me if they saw her. They laughed. I laughed, getting the joke. But I waited. Hay kicked up by the wind made me flinch. I could not even save myself.

In the afternoon, the brother came and got me and I could not say a word. My shoes were tight and we rode two days into Carolina. We ferried across oceans that were not oceans, that were only sounds, he said. Pelicans crossed our path. When we stopped the horse for water, one dove near. Shot out of the sky, a tangle of bones plummeting. I thought it dead. None had come to our orphaned pond. But in the drowning, it wrestled a fish and rose. We slept beneath the cart. I wrapped my arms around a wheel so as not to clutch my master in my night wanting. It was April and the dark still cool. I briefly wondered at my life.

“Your mother dead?” he asked in the morning.

My mother. I didn’t have a mother.

“Father?”

“Sir, he was a drunkard,” for that is what the crows had called him.

We rode two miles more. I sat up this time, kept my eyes wide. I was mostly grown, not the worm I was when last I rode in such a cart. Everything I saw could be used for when I next escaped. A creek there, blackberry bushes, a trunk with a hole in it, perfect for hiding. I knew I would never see them again. I was too lonely to go where there were not men. I sat tall next to Brother Sterrett and tried to guess how hard he’d hit.

“Are you much religious?” I asked.

He turned to me, surprised. The reins looked so easy in his hands, I wanted to hold them.

“I am not much,” I answered myself, staring straight forward, man-like.

“You haven’t seen a lot one way or the other,” he said.

He was stupid. “You can’t
see
God.”

“You’ll see plenty before you’re done. Squeamish?”

I didn’t know the word. Didn’t answer.

He patted his belly. “Does your stomach turn easy?”

Whiskey’ll do it, I thought. Dead men. Fires. Serving girls. Men with lashes. Urine. Wooden closets. Moles.

“You work hard,” he said, “you’ll earn your dinner, so no fear I’ll starve you. I don’t know what the nuns gave you, you’re a sack of bones, but any tool needs its oil. This is a job, though, not a home. Just stay on the right side of that.”

Not a home. How should I live in a house with a man and his son and eat their corn and sleep with dreams and shit in the same distant hole and not have a home? Where was it? The woman who was my friend before I killed a girl would say all that will come when I am dead. The good comes later, when we claim it from heaven. So long as we keep coming back to our forgiveness wheel. Nothing to do but wait. Nothing for me now. I only worried how long I’d live.

WE WERE BACK
in South Carolina, where I may have been from. Near Beaufort, he had a house. Small and wood and washed white. A woman had lived there but was dead or gone. The boy had not my years but fewer. We matched in thinness, in wary stares. The three of us shared a room. A second held the hearth and an old quilt frame, boards across it to make a table. The third was where the bodies came. Broken and bruised. Cracked skulls, festering feet. Spider bites. They’d said he was a
doctor, but I never guessed the ailments. How twisted the body could get and stay alive long enough to reach his office. So there were no ladies with sweet coughs, I didn’t mind. I was brave enough for worse. And, secret, I wanted to learn how to heal a man who was choked with drink. Who was lying in a puddle of his filth, cramped in a blackberry dip by a copper pot. I wanted to know if that was a man you could save.

The first day I thought I’d learn to heal. I had my hands out straight, strong. I was not to hold the binds or bandages, though, but to empty the basins. Blood, piss, puke. The little one watched me from the corner of the house, squatting. He wore a shirt that touched his knees and nothing else. Sterrett said it was a negro shirt, left over from the man they used to have. The negro had held the binds and bandages until he cut himself on a little knife and his veins boiled open. The boy chewed his hands in sorrow. I was no negro, and they would not care for me. The boy whistled at me as I scrubbed the pot out with elm leaves, rough to catch the clots. I once flung piss at him sideways, but he ducked rabbit-fast behind the house. I thought for days he might be mute.

I had practice in being quiet. I knew to listen. Knew my own voice was weak and not worth hearing. No surprise that another boy knew this too. We were mirrors of each other, broken. But I was holding the offal and he had no duties. Seemed almost wild. I thought, that is because his father is not dead yet. There was no affection between them, no touched hands, and if I could have written a story of fathers and sons, this is what it would have been: he lashed us both when we mischiefed, but hit his son harder. I could’ve told the boy things but didn’t. In the surgery, there was no talk of kinship. Bodies came in, bodies
went out. Men tied to nothing, not even their own limbs. Just pieces to be sewn up, skin to be patched. No heart, no thoughts, unless there really was a heart, or a brain split wide. We were not meant to feel.

The first man I saw die on the slab in the surgery had been shot with a musket by his wife. She wanted to give a fright, Sterrett said. Half his chest had torn open, his left arm hung by a cord to his shoulder. His eyes still flickered. His heart, bare, shuddered. Sterrett gave him something, whispered in his ear, pressed his eyes shut, closed his own. I saw him flinch and breathe and then expire. Like nightfall, fast. Sterrett left the room and I stayed quiet. I watched the dead man and waited. I touched him once before he was cold. I slipped my fingers under his thumb and bounced it. It fell heavy each time, turning paler. I backed away. The blood was leaving through the hole Sterrett cut in his back, a thick leak into the white bowl below. When it filled, I could not yet move, and watched from the corner as it flooded over. I rubbed my fingers on the scratch of my pants. I worried the dead would stay on them.

I was not jelly-kneed. I was not a child, or a coward. I had seen dead men, had buried some, had touched one, had killed a girl. But I knew of hauntings. Vapors in a man come out when he has passed, and body or not, they linger. They cling. You can smell them like old eggs. The crows had said this was not true, that the spirit was invisible and anyway was holy, it did no wrong but went up to heaven direct, no dallying, to be with our father. I knew better. What spirit would want to be with its father? I took to washing myself in the marshes. Taking on the swamp smell to drown out the dead. Nor did I go walking at night. The ghosts would not know me to haunt me. They must
have draped around Sterrett like ivy. He did not mind when men came in and old flesh went out. When a man walked up with “My chest is sore” and left with pennies on his eyes.