Free Men (16 page)

“Jesus,” I said.

She scrunched her face.

“Hero,” I said. “Best Child.”

“Protagonist,” she said. She brushed her fingers fast across my forehead, rubbing out the serious.

“Protagonist,” I said. I didn’t know the word.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“It will be a boy,” I said, though I could not know this, and though I was afraid of men. I felt a boy would be the fate of me. That I deserved one for what I had done, all the evil I caused needing repayment. But this would be a different boy. Blessed and calm. I would be a different father. We had Anne.

At the end of summer, she bent over in the garden. Her hand to one side. Her face a slant. I was building a shelf beside the hearth, could see her through the window. I came outside and asked if she were ill. She shook her head. A little blood, she said. She asked to be let alone. I gave her the house and sat in the bed she’d been furrowing for the squash and listened to her crying through the wall. I stuck my thumbs in the soil and twisted. Waiting. A worm came rudely up. If any animal had no family, worms would be it. I never saw two together. I stroked its side and it lashed around. I wished for a toad to feed it to. It found the dirt again and dove. A little dirt fish. I didn’t want to lose anything.

Dark now. She opened the door and said come in. I waved my hand and kept my eyes down. Looked at every brown grass flake, each gnawed stone. She said come in. But she had said a little blood, so I stayed still, my bottom in the dirt. I shooed her. She closed the door. I didn’t want to know. I was sitting and then I curled over, my knees to my chest. I fell asleep in the furrows. No dreams, just outside sleeping. Me in a long, long emptiness.

She brought me milk in the morning and put my hand on her stomach.

“We’ll try again,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Darling,” she said, which was my favorite word of hers. It made me feel young and not like a boy but something dear.

Where did he go, our child? I’d done no bad things since I came there. I asked her if I could see him.

“Nothing left to see.”

I was angry because she wasn’t crying anymore.

She said, “Here. Listen. This is what women do. This is what happens. We will have another. Shh.” Her arms were all the way around me now.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t want her to understand.
What women do
. She knew things she would never tell me. She would never tell me where our baby was. She pulled me up and brushed the dirt from my clothes and kissed my cheek and picked at the dirt beneath my fingernails and kissed my wrist and we kissed and we went inside and lay next to each other, but only softly touching.

ONLY A YEAR,
and she was rounding again. This time would be different. I walked behind her. I stooped to pick the weeds so she wouldn’t. I held her elbow on the path to church. I nailed the shelf a foot lower so she needn’t reach. She got so sweated in the heat that I carried a bucket and cloth with me, to damp her face whenever she sighed. She said she didn’t like the fussing, but the baby liked it, for he grew and grew. When her stomach became a pouch, I’d lie in bed beside it, my head by her hips, and the skin would thin away in the dark so I could see the limbs
of him. Small foot, small fist. He didn’t smile at me, because he didn’t know me.

Her aunt was sicker. Anne visited her once a day, but this was a danger. Surely the sickness had fingers and could move from one to another. So many had died. And if the sickness found its way inside my wife, dripped into her belly? I told her she was not to go again. She said this was needless fear, and I said this was a husband telling his wife. Once a midwife came to feel the kicking, but two weeks later she too had caught the sickness and two weeks after that had died. It did not matter that our town had lost its midwife, because I no longer trusted a stranger to touch my wife.

In the fall, a letter said her aunt was at the end. Anne begged to see her. Another letter came when she was dead. They would bury her along the old brick church with its corners in crumbles, another stone among the rows. That day I had to ride to Charleston with the crop and told my wife to be still. Don’t go to the church, I said. Your aunt is dead, nothing to see. I told her plague can rise through soil. Standing on top of the newly dead, she’d feel the sickness climb her skirts. She gave me a smile that wasn’t strong.

I was gone a night and day and when I opened the door to our house again, my whip in one hand and white asters in the other, I half expected to find her gone, a vapor, just a vision I’d once had. But she was sitting where she should be, in the chair with her cloth and needle by a cold hearth, for I told her not to light it alone. Under the window on the table were goldenrods.

“You went out,” I said.

She rose to meet me. It was hard to hold her, the belly between us. I set my poor flowers down beside hers.

“A short walk,” she said, fidgeting her fingers along my arm.

“And if you had stumbled?” I tried not to look at her beauty. I loved our family more even than her face.

“Someone would have caught me.” Me not looking at her, she looked away. “I went to see her buried. The churchyard is so near.”

I said what she said again in my head. Her hand on my wrist burned. She had been with the dead. The plague was on her. The baby. I couldn’t see him now, through the layers of skin and skirt. I couldn’t see him to hold him. Just wanted to hold. And she. I’d said she couldn’t go. If we lost another. She was rubbing my arm, trying to stop my red face before it cried. All the lives I’d seen bleed out. Chances gone wrong. No love, and then this, my new love. If someone should take it from me. If anyone. I shook off her hand, and in the shaking raised the whip and hard lashed her once across the knees. Lower than my father did.

She sucked her breath into a pang. She didn’t step back. I didn’t move. I dropped the whip. We didn’t move.

WHEN I CAME
home, I brought her flowers. Anything colored. Blazing star, horse mint, green eyes, dog tongue. Leaves that were gold. I don’t know why I always reached for flowers. I had stayed in the woods to hide my shame.
I’m sorry
, I said.
I’m sorry I’m sorry
. She knew. She said she knew. I sat her on the bed and pulled down her stockings and put my face to her knees and kissed the welts. She said I was a good man. It crushed my bones to hear her. She trusted that I wouldn’t harm her, not knowing. She was a woman, married, her skin as thin as silk. I hated this for her. I loved her.

I buried the whip in the yard.

“How will you get the horse to trot?” she asked.

I whispered in her ear and kissed her and showed her how.

I held her more than I ever had, I stepped back, I let her bend into the garden, I looped her hair in the morning, we went for walks and when she sat on the old wharf on the river I didn’t clutch her hand. Every night I stumbled into new depths of needing. I kissed her face until its paleness pinked. We slept coiled like snakes. Three bodies in a nest. I didn’t speak of hurting her, and she said nothing. Oh, what it is to be a woman. To pretend to forget.

We had a snow that winter. What children were left gathered it and ate it with sugar. The fish were drowsy in the Ashley so we caught extra. I found a rabbit-fur muff in the city for her. I told her all the stories I could think of to show her how ready I was for love, the noisy kind. She knew, she knew. When she had pains, I sang to her until she laughed to quiet me. We warmed our toes at the fire, we tried to lace them in each other’s like fingers. The fields were sleeping. Our son was growing.

He would farm. He would ride jumping horses. He would box with other boys. He would learn letters and maps. He would eat oats before they had cooled. He would kneel to pray. He would cling to his mother’s knees, would always know what a rare and wondrous thing it was to have a mother. I carried ten-pound sacks of rice in my arms, to practice holding him.

Anne walked behind me, said, “Girls weigh just the same.”

SHE BEGAN TO
scream in March. Before a moonless dawn he came. Blood, and a baby. Blue-faced. A tangle at his neck. I pulled it clear. He wasn’t breathing. Anne whacked his back. I blew into his mouth. “Warm him,” she said, and I
took him to the fire. The sheets around my wife were filling up with color, her face growing white. He coughed once. We stared at each other, wild, mouths open in hope. She pushed the wet hair from her cheeks. On her elbows now, knees up, a crab. “Rub him,” she said, and I stroked his back in circles by the fire. He gasped a bubble. His little knotted face. His blue would not warm. He would not move his hands. A chill on his skin.

“Wake up,” I said, “wake up.” My son that made me a father. “Wake up.”

“Darling,” she said. I turned. In her hand a twist of sheet. The red was all around her. Her face the missing moon. My wife was bleeding out.

In the terror on her face I saw the woman Sterrett healed. I was the man that should be kissing her shoulders and her neck, except there was no Sterrett and the midwife was dead and I was the only one who knew that by putting my hands inside her and sewing something shut I could save her. But what would I feel for, in that womb? What if I pulled out not the pain but her life and then it was me that killed her? And where, during all this, would I lay my son?

I was on my haunches by the fire, my wife beyond my reach, the baby in my hands. Sometimes breathing, sometimes not. How long now was it since his last? If I put him down, he would die, would forget he had a father. I could not move. My son was in my hands. My wife across the room. Calling me. I could save her if I knew how, if I could put down my son, but I did not know how, and I could not put him down. I was in the lake again, my arms around the post. The house on fire. The girl caught in the flames I dropped. I lost her, and my father.
I could not touch my wife too. Please let God damn me for all I haven’t done. She wept like all women. She could have been any woman. The red around my wife. Her face asking. My heart crawled. I could not move. My wife was dying, but my son was in my hands.

A
CREEK DOESN’T MAKE
a sound but I think of her. Straw hair, blue eyes wide. I fled my house eight days ago on a horse that died. I have been missing from her for eight days. When these two men talk, I hear the hole that is her voice. Eight days since I’ve heard her words, like bells. The closest sound is the creek water running. Sweet creek, that never knew a wife.

We are here to thieve the strangers. I know what little sense this makes. They rode on horses, asked where water was, stared some, turned back the way they came. And the black man and the Indian were crouched within a minute, their fingers in a twitch. Were they criminals? Or just sinners?

One said, “It’d be nice to have what they have.”

And the other said, “I know that man.”

“They’re rich, is all, and surely more of the same at home.”

“It was her father.”

“We’ve just been talking about how to get on with these empty pockets.”

“She who never knew her father, and there he was. Sitting there.”

“We can guess what use they’ll make of it; I’ll tell you what. Spend some on liquor and some on whores and some to buy a safe to put the rest in.”

“Damn him who made her, and damn her.”

“Are you listening? Now’s the time, we’ve got a chance. Been given it.”

“Men abandon, and women ruin.”

“Stop muttering. Plenty of fine folk in the world, I’m just guessing these aren’t them. You had your money stolen, right? Who’s to say this isn’t it?”

“The world is not so circular.”

“Damn wrong it’s not circular! Wake up!”

And all I was saying was
no, no
, but silently. I knew the circle of the world, and it had sharp edges.

They made speeches with closed ears. One kept pulling at his pants, fingering at the scruff on his cheek, the other picked at a spot on the earth till it was clean of leaves. They did not know they did this. Our wants were greater than their wants, is what was figured, and our hearts better. Between fiddling and neatening, they judged themselves. But how did they judge the others? Those men who passed never told us who they loved. This is a lie, I said, or did not say. I did not want the money. Nothing left in the world must be given to me.

I am trying to clean myself. I am walking so many days away from the woman and the boy and even the horse that died beneath me so that I will come to a place where I am reminded of nothing. Am empty. The first two days were crying. The third was burning need for her, to touch her again, her face, to bury
her. The shame at not having buried her. I turned back. Walked a few miles back. Why didn’t I put them in the ground? Because if she is not below ground, she is not fully dead. I could not put dirt on her white body, though it is worse to have left her. I know. Turned around again. On the fourth day I had cried all the water out of me and so the world went hazy. My mouth stayed open, my eyes lost their blink. This was close to empty. Then I thought how good it was that she was gone. Peace now, Anne and boy. I was not meant to be a father. I hurt my wife, I would have hurt my son. Yes, better they are sleeping.

I was not walking for penance until I was.
Forgive me, clean me, save me.
Everything I knew of myself I had to break. Love was all I knew of myself, so I would let this go. What had it brought me? Go away, heart and need, flee. When that was gone, I would be blank, and then—then could I die?

This I kept asking.

But I am poorly trained. The first sleeping man I saw I held to.

I should have let the man with the mule take me. The one who asked if I had killed.
Yes yes yes
. Can no longer count the times. So what if I wasn’t the one he was looking for. I too have sins to pay. I sat there in my home, on every chair a flower, and held my son in my hands while my wife lay on her bed, my son blue, my wife red. I could not move, and neither lived.

I am needing to be alone, but wanting these men to never lose me.

After the dark had settled on the path, they nodded. The Indian worn down, or the black man wanting to see his own courage. Decisions made that would’ve been dust if we’d been fewer than three. We turned to trace their steps, always turning on this path, walked, are walking, and now we crawl up from the trail in
silence. The black man stops his chatter. We creep, and I creep because I have given up, would follow anything alive, am waiting to see what God does to me. Have been waiting for eight days.

South from South Carolina, west from West Georgia. I rode with nothing but my fear and ghosts riding behind. I rode the horse until it dropped. Left it by the trail, a dead pile, wishing I could crawl into its deadness. I hid from men until it came to me that I could not kill myself. My hands could not kill one more thing. My arms missed holding. I was weak. I found a black man sleeping, his knife in a sheath, and I took that knife so when I crouched above him to feel his warmth, he would wake to something ordinary. A highway robber, or a man pretending to be. The black man brought me to an Indian, and here we are, after a day, creeping like brothers.

Never had a brother, but a wife. Soft. My loves were lost to me before they even lived. My son in my hands, his own young brother who I never saw. His mother crablike on the bed, red sheets swimming her. I could not leave one for the other. I was alone for all my life and then there was one and then there was two and myself frozen to the floor, my son in my hands, and I hadn’t the strength to move. Strength, courage. Courage, muscle. I didn’t have muscle to move. I was given too much. Now the world fixes itself.

I don’t know where I am, some miles above Florida, but it smells like home. Part salty. Small palms. The air goes on forever. In the dark, the pine spindles under my feet feel like the pine spindles of Carolina. I have lost the best part of me and the earth makes no difference. I want no money. If I do one more wrong thing and God is watching, I will explode into fire.

Have always had men watching me. Been plagued by them.
My father, my priest, Sterrett, the minister. Saying move just so on this narrow path or I will hurt you. Not the minister, but he passed his rod to God, and there was punishment enough. God worst of all. I have found more men to watch me but they are poor at it, for they are drawing me down a bad path, and never having led, I do not know how to save them. I cannot save them, who am so rotten.
Clean me, save me
.

Eight days on the road and I never asked for food. Never looked for water. A woman on a farm saw me and gave me a jug to swallow. A child held out a cake. I shook my head, but the child would not drop its arm. I took the cake and it watched me eat. Eyes like stars. I fell asleep in a horse yard behind an inn and when I woke a carrot had rolled before me, kicked in the night by a mule. I ate it. Tried to throw it up, but it clung inside. When it rained, I opened my mouth. I passed a slave in Georgia without a shirt. He leaned on a fence by the road, his mouth working on some tobacco. He asked me if I knew his master. I shook my head. If I needed work. I shook my head. If I was from these parts.
No.
He laughed and said he’d give me supper if I wanted, but his master was out, wouldn’t come back any time soon, maybe wouldn’t ever. A line of slaves stood in the trees behind the field. Two of them were dancing. He saw me looking. He had a gun slung on his back.
You hardly a white man
, he said. Pulled an apple from his pocket, rubbed it once along his bare arm, his arm that was too dark to show whether there was blood on it, and passed it over the fence to me. I ate. I could not throw it up. I walked eight days and tried not to live and kept living.

Grief carried me here but now is tired. Is sliding me from its shoulders. I cannot hold on because my hands are broken. I am a spoiled man. I cannot live without someone’s warmth against
me. Cannot become alone again. After all this, I am my father. My mouth as spiked and sour as his. My want has brought the end of me. These hands have burned a girl alive, left a hundred bodies bleeding on the slab, killed my own and only hope. Now when they grasp a branch to pull my body up the bank, I think the branch will turn to ash.

We are away from the path now, quiet. Our feet like doves in the leaves. The sweat on my lip tastes like her lips.

“Are you sure?” one says.

“This is your plan,” the other says.

“We do it together, right?”

“We take the bags, guns if we can, and walk out.”

“Horses?”

“Too noisy. Leave them.”

“We’re doing the right thing?”

“You told me we were.”

“What about Cat?”

“Give him my gun.”

“So you don’t think he’d kill us both?”

“You said—”

“What do I know!”

I linger in their wake. My feet heavy from lifting. My son still blue in my arms. His mouth an open bubble. His eyelashes long against his cheeks. Anne, unreachable. What creeks I would not cross to touch her. To prove that I can move, can hold, can save. I climb back on my grief. I have killed my wife and God will not kill me.

THIS IS HER
story. Grew up in Dorchester, went to school, went away. Lived in Charleston, came home. In the big city was
a plague, like ours. A pox. She followed a cousin to a house by the shore, her parents coming after. They wrote letters.
Coming soon, putting the shop to rights
. Her childhood was nothing sad, all sun. Her father rich and her mother kind. No brothers and sisters, not even dead ones. Just her in blue dresses.
Hold on, be good
. Believed in God, and won a prize for penmanship. She had dolls with real hair and wood faces. Little doll shoes. Dreamed of being a mother. Her own mother like an angel, putting sugar on Anne’s fruit.
Be patient
. She took a doll to the shore, though she was too old. Men eyed her, and one had asked. But she knew that somewhere I was waiting so said no. I said she could not have known. She said she did. The doll sat on the sill, her face out to sea.
On Sunday, we’ll be there
. The plague was spreading, though she didn’t know. When the rider came to the house he couldn’t speak at first.
It’s Sunday
, she said,
where are they?
He breathed heavy, having ridden fast.
Today is Sunday. Are they sick?
He shook his head.
They have no fever?
He shook his head.
Did they leave the city?
Yes, yes.
Where is my mother? Where is my father?
Oh, her mother and her father, they climbed in a carriage with their trunks and two wild horses and halfway to the shore, a fox ran out and startled them, and oh, those wild horses broke apart in panic and the carriage shuddered and smashed, and in the broken wood and axles, her mother and her father fell apart, were dragged with the splinters half a mile before the horses calmed and the fox found its den, and then they weren’t her mother and father but were bodies, and did not belong to her.
This is not true
, she said, but it was.

The cousin kept her through the sorrow. More men asked for her. She prayed on her knees morning and night until she was thinking not of their twisted legs but of their happy eyes and
all they did for her and all their love for her. God told her that love was living yet, and she believed him. And then she tried to be better. (Though she was already so good.) By the time she came home to Dorchester an orphan, like I was an orphan, she was looking for me. Wanting to share her luck at having been adored.

“Do you not still think of their bodies?”

“Their bodies were not what I loved.”

“Do you blame yourself?”

“For what?”

“They wouldn’t have died had they not been coming for you.”

“That isn’t how life works.”

“It is; they were coming for you, and they died.”

“If they hadn’t loved me, they may have died long before.”

“You don’t know.”

“But
you
don’t know.”

“God is supposed to know better.”

“He does. I am happy again, and now I have you.”

“You could have been happier.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Where is the doll?”

“I buried her.”

But when the fever came to Dorchester, she did not want to run away, did not want to climb in a carriage with her son in her belly, because an inkling in her said it was worse to sit in a cart than face the plague, that if her mother and her father had not moved they would have lived, and though she swore this wasn’t so, I know how the mind cripples and gnarls around loss. We stayed. Slept in our cabin while neighbors died. Waited for her
aunt to die. Death and waiting. She wanted myself as a father to be like her father, her like her mother. She told me of their games, I thought of their bones. I wanted to carry that guilt, except she didn’t carry it. Thought it was her fault, but
It’s not my fault
, she said. And it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t the plague that took her either.

THEY HAVE TOLD
me the plan. The gun looks broken in my hand. I offer it back to them, but Bob presses it to me. He knows my life is just a thin thread, and wants to save me. Why do strangers give me food and guns? It is supposed to be night, and they are supposed to be sleeping, and we will sneak in like weasels and slip things from their bags. Bob will get the guns, the Indian will get the money. Or whoever is closest. I am told to look for food if I want something to look for. I do not. I am told to use the gun to save them if they need saving.
I
need saving. The creek is louder now, my wife. The bank spreads out. The water is between us. They have crossed with their horses and settled on the other side. A sandbar cradles the bodies of the men. If the river had a tide we could sit and watch them wash away. I have sat and watched so many things, my legs are criminals. The white men rest on cots, hands draped over the side, brushing sand. The bags are under the cots, behind the hands. The brown men sleep on cloths beside them. The sky is high here. The black men sprinkled like pepper in the far brush. Near the horses.

We stand next to small trees. Our breath goes in and out. The first time I saw these golden flowers I thought of her. I pick two. Thin trumpets. I wonder why they don’t close up at night. Of all the pretty things that go away in darkness, these do not.
All these men in a clearing, waiting, all these flowers. Nothing moves except my hand. I rub the flowers, back and forth. My breath in and out. My wife waiting for me to put down my son and save her. Who will find their bodies? Her aunt is gone to heaven, and her husband here. They slipped away, one by two, and I could not move. Could not hear through the loudness of myself. A night passed, and when the light came I kissed my son by the hearth, once, and kissed my wife on the bed, once, and walked through the door and through the garden and down the road and out of Carolina. I left the door open. We’re all bodies waiting.