God's Fool (32 page)

“John was his favorite, you know.”

Gideon nodded. “I know. I’m just glad May didn’t live to see it.”

“How’s Billy?”

Ellen stepped out on the porch to see if there was anything we’d be needing, and to ask if we’d be staying for supper.

“You look very nice, Ellen,” I said.

“Thank you, Mistah Chang,” she said. “You sure you and Mistah Eng won’t be stayin’ on for supper now?” She smiled. “Mama’s always sayin’ you can’t get enough of her ham hocks, an’ mine’s twice as good.”

“She’s just like Grace,” I said, when she had gone inside.

“I don’t know what we would have done without her all these years,” said Gideon. We sat quietly for a long while, not saying anything. In the field, the shadows of the trees had grown longer. The hot bands of sun were now just thin, reddish strips, cutting across the green; the light, midge-speckled and low, had been herded east across the furrows to the edge of the woods. The three women were gone. A hot breeze stirred the branches hanging above our heads, then died.

Gideon was looking into the distance, seeing nothing. “Strange,” he said. “Evenings like this you could almost believe it hadn’t started yet.” He took another sip of his drink, then, noticing the newspaper on his lap, laid it by the side of his chair.

“It’ll be over sooner than you think,” said my brother.

Gideon hardly missed a beat. “Oh?” he said, as naturally as if these were not the first words of actual opinion we had heard my brother speak in weeks. “Why do you think so?”

“Because it won’t work,” said my brother, as though he’d been part of our conversation all along, and for a moment I felt a pang, remembering how good it had been once, the three of us arguing over something or other late into the night, then walking home, our shadows rippling across the wall of corn or pouring over the stubble.

“Conscripting the blacks won’t work,” he went on. “The Yankees won’t fight over slavery.”

“Why not?”

“Because they won’t. Union, maybe. Slavery? Never.”

“You don’t think it will work.”

“No, I don’t. One out of fifty is an abolitionist. The rest don’t care about the blacks.”

“And even that one out of fifty may not want to lay down his life for him,” I said, careful not to look at my brother. It had been so long since I had agreed with him about anything, I was fearful of seeming to curry his favor.

“The war is as good as over,” said my brother. “Six months at most, we’ll go our separate ways.”

“You really believe that.”

“I do. Absolutely.”

“What about you?” I asked Gideon. “What do
you
think?”

“What do
I
think?” He looked at us a moment, then out across the peaceful abundance of our fields. “I’ll tell you what I think.” He tapped the paper by his side. “I think the diseased fungus from the womb of despotism has just won the war, gentlemen, but that it will take us a while to realize it.”

Eng snorted. In the distance, I could hear a dinner triangle begin to chime, calling the slaves in from the fields. I could smell the cooking coming from inside the house. “That’s what worries me most,” Gideon went on, “that it will take us a long time to see it. No,” he said, that small, sad smile I loved so much momentarily passing across his face, “it can’t be over. We haven’t suffered nearly enough.”

X.

I think I knew he was gone the moment I heard the door slam and saw Addy running toward us across the yard, running not the way a woman runs—even a frightened woman—but like a woman escaping a demon, clawing and flailing at the air as though pulling herself along by invisible strands, or fighting her way through them. She tore straight into the early cotton as if it weren’t there, plowing across the furrows, whirling at the plants grabbing at her skirts. When she went down, hard, I knew for certain, but by this time the moment had burst its shell and we were running as we’d never run before—quietly, ferociously—cutting a swath across that vast green expanse, and then we were there and she was sobbing in my arms, gasping, “Oh God, oh God, what’re we going to do?” and Eng was yelling, “What? What is it?” and I was reading the note behind her back. The paper folded in the wind; Eng took the other side. “Tell Father not to worry,” he’d written toward the end. “I’ll look out for myself.”

“Stand up,” I said to Addy, raising her up. “Stand up now.” I could hear my own voice—familiar yet strangely detached—as though it were coming from inside a well.

“What are we going to do?” she said.

“We’re going to get him,” I said.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” said my brother.

•     •     •

We were gone within the hour, our bedrolls in the wagon behind us, the one daguerreotype of Christopher, taken when he was not yet ten, safely tucked between the blankets. The date was April 20, 1863. A warm, wet wind blew from the south. Christopher had taken the mare. “I’ll pay back for Sal with my wages,” he’d said. By nightfall we’d gone no more than twenty miles. No one had seen him. Boy on a roan mare? Fifteen? No, don’t believe so. Dark hair, little bit like us in the eyes? No, can’t say’s I have. Two hours out of town we were freaks again, back in the land of the long pause, the uncomprehending look (“Say, ain’t you the two I saw …?”), the body turning with the head as we passed as if welded solid at the neck.

That first night we made a fire in a small patch of woods off the road, ate our meal, then bedded down in the wagon, the shotgun by our heads. We lay quiet for a time, listening to the stream where we had dipped our water. “He’s smart enough not to try close to home,” Eng said suddenly.

“I know,” I said.

“They may not take him.”

“They’ll take him.”

“He doesn’t look eighteen.”

“He doesn’t have to.” I could hear the water, chuckling to itself in the dark. To the left, an irregular strip of sky in the leaves overhead showed the direction of the road. “You know him,” I said. “He’ll talk his way in. He’s good at that. He’ll try one place and then …” And suddenly it was as though the thing I’d been holding in all day had to get out somehow and I could feel a strange, helpless rage rising up inside of me and hear myself saying, “I won’t lose him, brother, I won’t,” but it wasn’t until I realized Eng had put his arm around me and was patting me awkwardly on the back, saying “It’s all right, brother. It’s all right. You’re not going to lose him,” that I realized I was crying, something I’d forgotten I knew how to do, and something I wouldn’t do again for over a year.

We were up at dawn, traveling north and east as the roads would
allow, hunting the war we’d spent the better part of two years trying to avoid. It didn’t take long for the first signs to appear—odd things: an upturned wagon, a house with a door hanging crazily off its hinges … One morning we spotted three men running far off across a vast, untilled field, then watched as they leaped a hedge, one after the other, like awkward deer. On the fifth day we came across a large group of male slaves, watched over by four men on horseback. There must have been forty or fifty, all young, sprawled about in the shade of the trees. Some sat with their backs against the trunks; others cooled off by a small grassy stream, pouring water over their heads with a dipper. Five wagons, two of them loaded with supplies, stood by the side of the road.

The men watching them had been talking to each other, their horses nosed in, when they saw us coming up the road. As we approached, one turned his horse partway about while the others shifted slightly in the saddle to face us. They looked like a father and three sons to me; the father a hard-looking man in a dusty black vest with a fine white mustache coarse as a buck tail, the sons quiet, unmoving, watchful and suspicious as wolves in a pen.

“What the hell you want to do that for?” said the father when we told them we were looking for the Confederate Army. “You don’t
look
crazy.”

“We’re not,” said Eng.

“Must be damned fools, then. Most people with half a brain are tryin’ to get the hell
away
from the war.” He paused. “You lookin’ to enlist?” he said, incredulous.

“I’m looking for my boy,” I said.

“You won’t find him.”

“I didn’t ask you that,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of the others tilt his head slightly as though hearing something. Another, who had been chewing on a stem, stopped.

There was a moment’s silence. “That’s true,” said the father, leaning forward a bit in the saddle, “you didn’t. But I’m goin’ tell you anyway because I’m a goddamned humanitarian and because you seem like the
kind of man who just might listen to reason. I’ve lost two myself—one at Manassas, the other I don’t even know where. I’m sayin’ you might as well shoot yourself right here and save your horse the trouble. I wouldn’t send a nigger into that hell.”

The young men shifted uncomfortably in their saddles. There was a long pause.

“How old is this boy of yours, anyway?”

“Fifteen,” said my brother.

He nodded. “Tell Lacey to get ’em up,” he said to no one in particular, and one of the boys stepped his horse around and trotted off. We watched him come up to the edge of the glade and sweep his right arm up—an abrupt gesture both martial and oddly graceful.

“Go on,” he said to the others. “I’ll be right there.”

My brother picked up the reins. “Where are you taking them?” he said, indicating the crowd of blacks now walking toward the road.

“Wherever it is a man’s property can’t be stolen away from him for the sake of the Confederacy. Texas, if I have to.” He looked at me. “You’re a fool,” he said. “You want to find the war? All right.” He pointed up the road. “Day east, maybe less. Turn left up the Shenandoah. Follow the smoke.”

And that is what we did. I can see us still, as in a dream, traveling north up a great valley, past thick woods and open fields, neat country graveyards and small white churches no different from our own, past a straight thin column of yellow smoke rising a mile or so off the road, past a small group of men—three digging with handkerchiefs tied around their mouths, one catching his breath, leaning on his shovel—burying half a horse at the far edge of a weedy meadow. I can see us stopping by a hundred-acre field stamped into dust and smelling of human waste. It started to rain, then stopped. We walked past heaps of oyster shells and broken bottles and cans of preserved fruit with their tops scissored out; past a thousand bits of paper and trash moving, in fits and starts, across the field, only to catch, like pulled cotton, in the tan
gles at the edge of the woods; past abandoned kneading troughs and blackened fire rings that dogs or coons or crows had dug about in, looking for bits of meat fallen in the ashes …

I can see us walking, over and again, down the narrow roads running between tents and cook fires, past men and boys too tired to hoot, past a man playing “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” on a mouth harp, following us with his eyes, past another (hair as lank and light as straw) sitting on a bucket, tongue clamped, scratching out a letter against the back of a tin plate …

They couldn’t help us. At the end of every one of those roads was a captain or a colonel with bloodshot eyes named McGowan or Gordon or Perrin or Field who couldn’t divulge the movements of the Confederate Army, who had absolutely no way in hell of knowing where on God’s green earth my boy could be and who couldn’t find him any more than he could find a particular pebble in a field, or a particular leaf in a forest, or a particular kernel of corn in a cornfield the approximate size of the entire goddamned state of Maryland, but who assumed he was probably home with his mother by now, having discovered that the Confederate Army did not enlist children.

I can see us standing inside the tent of one of them—it might have been Field—who seemed to have more authority than the rest. Behind him, I remember, two bearded young men studied a huge map laid out over a wooden table. Every minute or two the flap would open behind us, letting in a gust of cold, wet air, and a young man would enter, salute, and offer some obscure bit of news, which would be acknowledged, and he would withdraw.

“How long have you been looking?” he said.

“Almost three weeks,” said my brother.

“And you just walked into all the other camps the way you did into mine?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Amazing.” A hard gust of wind shook the canvas. “A drink?”

“No. Thank you.”

“What, exactly”—he indicated his own side with the hand holding the bottle—“is the nature of your condition?”

“We’re connected, sir,” said my brother.

“I see. Can you shoot?”

“Yes.”

“Run?”

“Yes.”

A young man entered and handed Field a written note. “Tell the captain he did not misunderstand,” he said.

“You say you have a wagon, hidden away somewhere?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I need wagons.” He poured himself a drink. “And men too, connected or not.” He paused, considering. “So this is the deal I’ll make you. You are free to go. If I see you again, however, I will enlist you, and your wagon, in the Confederate Army. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said my brother. We turned to go.

“Bunker.” We turned around.

“I can’t help you find him,” he said.

“I know that,” I said.

“Christ himself couldn’t help you find him.”

I nodded.

“Go home.”

The horse and wagon were gone. When we came to the place where we had hidden them, a patch of dense, scrubby woods rising like an island out of the middle of a vast, muddy field, we found hoof prints and wagon ruts filling with rain, and nothing else. That night we slept in an old, sagging barn with boards missing from its walls and a huge, gaping hole in the roof through which the rain came down all night like a gray column. It still smelled of livestock. In the morning we could see the foundation of the house that had stood just up the hill. We walked outside. Branching streams, like hoarfrost on a window, had cut through the dirt. Bits of yellow hay were moving in the muddy waters or caught
against the banks like broken bridges. We passed the teeth of a rusting cultivator, brought down by weeds, and started down the road.