Free Men (14 page)

Suppers were silent but not without sound. Sterrett chewed his meat open-mouthed and swallowed loudly. The boy ground his teeth, scraped his spoon across the tin plate, and sucked his food from cheek to mouth and back again, making pulp from solid. I made my mouth work as hushed as I could. I was a deer, safe among the wolves. We ate meat every night, and my belly slowly pouched. Bread, cabbage, and on Sundays, pudding. Neighbor women brought the dish as payment for his presence. My first taste of raisins. They drank a cider that was sweeter than my father’s whiskey, and if we were well fuzzled, Sterrett would play his fiddle in the dusk and the boy and I would wrestle or sleep. There was nothing wrong, or lacking. Nothing that hurt. But I was cold every night, on the floor, under wool, in the summer dark.

WHEN THE HOUSE
was empty, the father lying half drunk beneath a tree, as fathers do, the son would walk me to the shore and show me bones. Was this the first time I had seen the ocean? I wouldn’t know it, for how familiar it was. Like my home creek running clear through the still, like the rotten backwater marshes by the lake where I dipped to hide, like rain coming down, except wide, wide, wide. The boy thought me a fool, but I knew what to do. I ran in up to my knees, then dove. What boys do with water. I remembered every cut I didn’t know I had. I couldn’t see below, not with my eyes open, so I let him show me. He made the dead horseshoe crabs dance, the empty mussels play. If I laughed, he’d kick me in the calves. If I spoke,
he’d run into the sea until his head was under. Some things are so thick with marvel, one person is not enough to see them. I wanted to show someone the ocean. There was no one near. I pointed to the waves, still coming, never not coming, but the boy didn’t follow my hand.

When once I slept half in the sand, the boy wrapped a jellyfish round my head. I woke in screams, thinking my face was being shred. He said it was a man-eating weed, and I spat at him. Sterrett rubbed my face with wet sand and made me wash in vinegar. I cried and said I was not crying. When he was calm, the boy would sit on a dune between the marshes. I would rest stick’s-length from him. The sun was hotter than I ever knew it. The cut of wind made us think we could sit endless. He dug holes to piss in, and I broke apart dead crabs and threw their bits at the seagulls. We moved as little as we could, like we were dying.

Such sea days were rare. People hurt themselves more than they did not. My stomach grew harder. Filled from inside, sickened from out. I was not scared long. I sawed bones to fold men in half who would fit in a child’s box. I cut fingers and baked them and gave them to lovers who begged. I held a baby, unborn, and washed her and buried her though Sterrett said to throw her out. I saw the insides of negroes, as red and pink and wet as our innards. Or regular innards, I had not seen mine. Little ails too. Splinters, corns, coughs, baldness. A man with a snake still in him, the fangs spread wide, grinning. A fingernail pulled off. A girl with no mother, thinking she was bleeding to death the first time she got her courses. A boy who found a nest, swallowed an egg, hatched a bird inside. People who wanted to smash their heads against rocks. No man is never hurt. I grew
precious toward my body. When I cut myself on an urchin, I wrapped my own finger. Swaddled my own blood, kept it for myself.

The only time my sickness overswamped my belly was when they brought the girl. I was thirteen, and she was not much older. A serving girl, or poor. Burned raw. He could do nothing. She looked at him until her eyes stopped looking. Her skin in puddles. I did not ask what fire was set. What crime. It was mine as a boy. Her feet had not been fast enough. High up in the attic, where unwanted things go. Old wicker chair, box of curtains for winter, wooden horse for riding, what is put in attics? Serving girls. Red-haired and slow. I never had to see her body. If she had had a body left. Fingers dancing in the flame. She will keep dying. Here she is again, a ghost of a ghost. She left her skin on the table when they took her body. The rag in my hand would not move. I had lit the pyre. My dinner dribbled up and burning from my mouth. The candle had been in my hand and then not. Sterrett hit me once and took the rag himself. There is no wooden closet here to tell my sins.

ONCE, WITH STERRETT
gone, the boy and I brought inside a three-legged toad. We’d found it coming home from the shore. It crossed our path, streaking the blood from its once-leg. The boy patted it dry with a leaf. I rolled it in my shirt. In the surgery, I gave the stump a bandage. The boy sang a frog song to keep it still. Its wet eyes got bigger. In the hearth room a flat ladder grew up to a hole in the ceiling. A narrow space sat empty above us. We crawled up with our patient, made a grass nest in a box of laudanum bottles. Thimble of water. Two worms, cut in half. The boy said they’d grow back their heads and be four.

Sterrett came home, we ate supper, eyed each other with panic and mystery. We twitched in our seats. Every branch against the window was the toad resurrecting.

The next day Sterrett was called out again, and we took a candle up the ladder to the space above. I wouldn’t call it an attic. I didn’t hold the candle. We peeked into the box. The toad had moved an inch and one half of the halved worms was gone and the others were dead and the bandage was gone and the brown grass was a little blood-rusty. The toad’s eyes didn’t look so big. I told the boy to touch it and he said no. He grabbed my hand and forced it in the box but I swung out my elbow and jabbed him in the ribs and he put my neck under his arm and I had my knee in his stomach and his hands were grabbing at my hair and my foot kicked him in the crotch. We were too old to bite each other. I thought that was a victory but after he finished clutching himself, he leaped at me again and in the tumble my leg went through the floor. We stopped. I wasn’t much hurt. A leak had made a soft patch in the wood. He sat and considered. I hung there, my hands keeping my weight up. The candle had gone out. I wished one of us had touched the toad, to see.

He pulled me out and we climbed down the proper way. We were too clumsy to fix our clumsiness. He swept up the bits of wood from the hearth floor. I said maybe Sterrett never looked up. We waited. At supper again, and he rolled his mouthfuls between his cheeks and swallowed down two mugs of cider and bent his head to scratch at his scalp. The boy and me sweating. We looked down, we pointed out dirt on the floor, we shook our shoes to draw attention to them. The food was gone, and Sterrett tapped his pipe. His yawn was horseapple-sized. Back in his chair he leaned and looked straight up. Like he was moon-gazing.

He made the boy fetch the toad. Sterrett lifted it from the laudanum like a ball and threw it out the open door.

“Which one of you?” he said, pointing up at the hole.

“The toad I found,” I said, but he didn’t care about vermin. His hand was still pointed firm up. “It was—” and I made a bowl of my hands to show, but the lash cracked against the table and I stopped.

“You fall through my ceiling?”

His eyes said I should not say yes. I did not say yes. He snapped his wrist again and the plates jumped. How was he so quickly armed? His beard twitched on its own. I brought my hand up again and crooked my finger, to show the cripple of the toad whose story I was going to tell, but the boy punched my arm.

“Me,” he said, and Sterrett took him outside and beat him. He did it lower than my father, at the knees. This made walking sting. I heard him crying out. I stood where they left me, my finger still in a crook.

Under the blanket, I couldn’t sleep. Sterrett was spread out on his stomach, muffling snores into his pillow. On the floor with me, the boy was quiet. I nudged him. Whispers were for nighttime talking.

“Why?” I asked.

He tucked one shoulder in.

I pushed him harder. “You didn’t do it,” I said.

He flipped around and stared. “So he lashed me. He would’ve lashed me anyway. Shut your loud damn mouth.”

“Do you think the toad was still alive?”

He lay so still, his eyes open, his brows a straight line, that I thought he was asleep again, however strange.

“I hate you,” he said.

I did not feel less bad for being spared. I felt I had skipped around God’s judgment. I was not afraid of being beaten, except that my leg already hurt from falling through the ceiling, but this was all right, I would’ve taken it. True, I was not his son. There is something about being a son. He maybe wanted the lash more than I did, it being his father’s hand, his father’s judgment. It is good to pay for the sins of the son. He would be loved more for it, when all the counting up was done and the world was over. But I was angry that he stole my burden. If boys were going to steal my sins, I must find a way to pay for them myself. I let him hate me, for hate was something I could carry.

I was still young. The worst was not knowing whether the toad was dead. Did he eat his little bandage?

The boy and I tried not to be friends again. He wood-wandered. I scrubbed blood.

AROUND US THE
world was fighting too. The bodies that came now were soldiers. I didn’t know what it was for, and Sterrett never said. I knew how men jabbed at each other. Each with a sense of what’s his own, and the fire to stake his life on it. In a war there are many ways to die. When I was almost sixteen, when the wind and sun were cold, they blew up the fort down the road from the town. Men came to fight us for our homes. What homes? Sterrett went to battle, his knives in a bag. He hid behind a tree behind a hill and they brought him the wounded. The boy took his drums out and tattooed the march. I stayed but heard the cannon. Not many men, a skirmish, but it was our river, our hill, so guns were pointed and popped. A game, if anything, though at least four dozen died. They returned with lit eyes. The boy’s arm in a
sling. The father proud. The only time I saw him proud. By the morning, the light was gone, and the British.

The next year, the boy left in regimentals. Was blown apart in some larger battle. Sterrett never wept, though I did. It made no sense that those I halfway loved were stolen. I’d go where they went, if only they showed me the way. The two of us remained. He didn’t urge me to pick up my gun, so I stayed. Beside each other, we worked through bodies. I came nearer the table. Began to dig bullets from muscle, from pillows of yellow bile. My world was a red world, and green with decay. He was careful to teach me nothing. He never named the parts, never pointed out the cure. This would be my only job, he said. I’d be useless if I left. I nodded and dug my fingers deeper in flesh. My hunger was not for the dead but for the living. I never said.

When the war paused, seemed to have ended, I was older than my indenture. I knew this, I knew my own age. Remembering it was remembering my father. A day came without any sick, and Sterrett told me to follow him to the woods to look for herbs. He knowing them, naming them silently, gauging their powers, and me picking them. I had a pouch and papers and I would lay the weeds between sheets so they would not touch. I saw which ones he pulled powdery from jars to give the fevered, the nauseous. I wasn’t wholly blind. But because he would have me so, I let him think it. Would point at a tiny tufted pine and ask if it was dogbane. These trips, we didn’t speak much. But it was damp and my clothes were thin.

“I’m plenty old now,” I said. “Think I’m free of any papers.”

He pointed out some large, flat leaves for me to sever.

“Whatever you signed to take me. I’m older than that now. Can’t keep me without pay.”

He stopped and dug a hard straw in his teeth. “You got somewhere to get to?”

“A wage is all, not much. I’m a white man, and old enough.”

He watched me fold up the leaves and pack them in my pouch. I stayed extra quiet now, to let him think. I pressed the leaves so soft they were like locks of lady hair. I fastened the pouch deliberate. I did not look at him but kept walking. Slow. The holes in my shoes let the chill in. Birds didn’t sing much in a drizzle.

He stopped me. Laid the terms. He’d feed me, house me, clothe me, teach me a little more. I told him I wanted paper money. I wanted pounds. He held up his hands—empty, for he carried nothing into the woods—and said that’s all he could do. We looked at each other, older and younger. I don’t think he either had somewhere to get to. I nodded. It’s hard to ask for something the first time.

He held me another year, filling me with meat. Not shouting so much. Offered me pence on Sundays. I kept them in a wooden box that once held barks, slipped beneath my bed. A year, and I started to feel like I might die the same man I started as. Full of holes, empty-handed, no-hearted. On the same wheel, nothing left to forgive. With no sins, how would God remember me? If I didn’t move, he’d forget. When we died, he’d forget to call my name. If I had no one to love, I’d have nothing to show for this life. I was a wilty plant, dried up to nothing.

A woman came who’d had a child and could not stop her bleeding, and all were there, the woman, the man, the screaming infant, three other children. All were crying. Sterrett stuck his hands deep within her and blood came flowing down his arms, running along his own raised veins. He turned something or pulled something, and then staunched it and took a needle
and thread below and made a fancy stitch, and though she was white as bones she was not dead. The man fell across her chest and held her tight. Kissed her shoulders and neck and breasts because her face was still too white and wide to touch. The children could not stop crying. We sent her home, where she may have died soon after, but in that room there was a family, whole, and I was awed by everything I didn’t have.

A whole year passed.

I was twenty-one and a man and not a son. In November the sawgrass glowed. The air was cool salt as it slid in and out of windows. The last of the duck flocks settled. Sterrett was sharpening his knives when a man came. I was in the field coaxing peas. His head was pumpkin-sized. His eyes labored to open. A line of red ran from one ear. A man had struck him in the public house. Words about a woman. We laid him down, me with his hand in mine. Sterrett trepanned him. Cut a burr hole in his head and let his mind swell. I patched him with cloth, stroked his cheek as he slept. Sterrett washed his needle and handed it to me and asked me would I stitch him together.