Nowhere Is a Place (13 page)

Charlie Lessing liked to consider himself a gentleman’s gentleman, but he did enjoy shoving his bare hands into the rich soil of his land. He found great pleasure in biting into the lush peaches that grew on it; he adored the rows and rows of cotton that seem to stretch endlessly—but his real guilty pleasure was sparring with the young slave boys.

___________________

More than a decade passes and Lou manages to avoid the whip. Buena and some of the others are not as lucky. Sometimes they speak too loudly or move too slow. Other times the gunnysacks come in too light or too full of unusable buds—whatever is wrong, Malroy the new slave driver and his whip are always there to punish it.

Since the twins came, Buena has found his spine again; he walks erect and talks loud, his eyes spit fire, and his lips are always drawn back across his teeth. Sometimes he listens, most times he doesn’t.

“Wild,” Lessing says, and signals Malroy to bring the whip across Buena’s back again.

He won’t cry out, no matter how many times that whip cuts across his back. Not a tear falls, and the fire does not go out in his eyes but burns brighter, and Malroy swears Buena’s eyeteeth are pointed and curled like a mongrel’s.

Lessing breathes and with a nod of his head the whip cracks skin again.

“I think he fi’n to bolt,” Malroy confides in Lessing.

“Is that what you think, Malroy?” Lessing laughs smugly and brushes a speck of brown from the white cuff of his shirt. “Personally, I think he’s contemplating murder.”

* * *

There seems to be no breaking Buena Vista. The hate is dug in deep. Not even the joy he gets watching his sons romp and play or Lou’s giving ways at night can pull him back from it.

Not even when she takes his hand and presses it against her stomach and says, “Two months gone and no blood.”

So much hate pulsing through him that he can’t get excited about the new life growing in Lou’s belly. He looks at his sons and his wife and can’t even remember what love feels like, what food tastes like. “Is water cool?” he asked Lou one day when her lips were still wet and glistening from the ladle of water handed to her in the field.

No sensation, no emotion, no taste—just the hate.

So Lessing sells him off. Cut-rate price. He’s tired of dreaming about shadows rushing at him in the dark, black hands reaching for his throat.

* * *

Goodbyes are for white folks.

Hand-holding people crossing dew-drenched meadows. Stargazing people whom the years have bound together so tightly, the two become one. Gray-haired people with creased faces and shared memories.

Goodbyes are for white folks and not for slaves, so Lou watches from the field as Buena is hauled away in the back of a wagon.

___________________

“C’mere, boy,” Malroy called to the thirteen-year-old Jim. He was long and lean like his twin, but slower in mind. Strong though, he could swing an ax better than a man twice his age, and seemed to find pleasure in cotton picking. Liked the cool waters of the stream, but had been whipped twice for frolicking in it during the hours he was supposed to be working. Smiled a lot and laughed out loud for no reason, held conversations with people no one but him could see. Slow.

Jim, who had been chopping wood, handed the ax off to one of the other boys, sauntered over to Malroy, and presented him with a wide grin.

“Massa Lessing say he want you today,” Malroy said, his lips peeling back to reveal three empty spaces in his gums.

Jim looked over Malroy’s shoulder and spotted Lessing striding toward them. Jim waved.

Malroy huffed in frustration. “Take off your shirt,” he commanded.

Jim slowly removed his ragged shirt and dropped it to the ground. “All right now, get on in there,” Malroy said, indicating the fenced-in space that Lessing liked to refer to as his “boxing pen.”

“Malroy!” Lessing called from less than twenty feet away.

“Yessir!”

“You count how many licks I get in, ya hear?”

“Yessir!”

Lessing approached the fence and, instead of walking through the opening, he hoisted himself up and climbed over. He sized Jim up, took in his lanky arms and narrow waist. The boy looked near starving. Lessing could see the bones of his rib cage with almost perfect clarity.

“Okay, boy, put your dukes up,” Lessing commanded as he raised his own fists and started churning them in Jim’s face.

At first Jim just grinned and watched as Lessing made a slow circle around him.

“I said put your dukes up, boy!” Lessing yelled again.

Jim giggled and pointed at him.

Annoyed, Lessing dropped his fists and turned his attention to Malroy. “You didn’t pick me a worthy opponent, Malroy!”

Malroy shook his head and started toward the pen. Halfway in, and almost as an afterthought, he turned to Lessing and asked, “May I, sir?”

“Yes, you may,” Lessing responded with a little snicker. Malroy stepped forward and brought the coiled whip from behind him, pulled back his arm, and then threw it forward. The whip unfurled like a deadly tentacle, whistling as it cut through the air. Then came the awful snap as it split the top of Jim’s right shoulder.

Jim stumbled, then collapsed to his knees, holding the bleeding, burning part of himself and screaming, “Mama, Mama, Mmmaaaaaaaaammaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

“Massa say put your dukes up. Now, get up and do it!” Malroy bellowed.

___________________

Lou had to stop for a moment. Pregnant again and not due for another month, the relentless Georgia heat beating down on her and not even the memory of a breeze to cool her burning brow.

She looked around to see if anyone was nearby, but the others were a good hundred feet ahead of her. She looked behind her, and the rows of cotton bucked and swooned, so she slipped her sack off her back and laid herself down onto the hot earth and dug back to a time she rarely allowed herself to visit: a moment in her life when she stood at the edge of the world and a blue sea rolled over her small feet and sprayed her young face cool.

“Lou.”

Her name came, but her little-girl self did not drag her eyes from the ocean, because that is not what she was called in that place. Instead, the little-girl part of herself took a step forward and watched the water climb her calves and lap at her knees.

“Lou.” More urgent now and someone shaking her shoulder. The dream burned away as Lou opened her eyes and looked into the yellowed ones of the slave woman called Vessa.

“You sick?” the young girl asked.

“Tired,” Lou said as she struggled to her feet.

“Your boy getting ready to fight Massa,” Vessa said out of the corner of her mouth as she quickly bent down and retrieved Lou’s sack.

“My boy?” Lou felt her heart whip in her chest, and she grabbed hold of her belly and looked toward the place where the pen was. “Which one?”

“Jim.”

It wasn’t a run but a sort of awkward gallop that got her there just in time to see Malroy bring the whip down across Jim’s left shoulder.

“Please!” Lou screamed as she lunged into the pen and threw herself between Malroy and a screaming Jim. “Please stop,” she begged as she reached one hand behind her back to touch her son.

Jim’s face was caked with dirt and tears. “Mama! Mama!” he cried and wrapped his shaking hands around her ankles.

“Ain’t you supposed to be in the field?” Malroy asked.

“Please, please,” is all Lou could find in herself to say.

Malroy shoved Lou out of the way, coiled the whip, and positioned it to strike again, when Lessing muttered, “Enough. These creatures are cowards.” He kicked at the dirt. “Is there not one among you that will spar with me?” he cried, his hands up, palms facing heaven.

No one said a word.

There were plenty of men who would step into that pen, but Lessing did not want a man; he wanted a boy, because any one of those men could have beaten him blind and Charlie Lessing knew it.

He was the coward.

“I’ll do it.”

Jeff made his way through the crowd and set the heavy pails of water down at his feet. He was slightly wider in the back than Jim, an inch taller, and had all his senses. “I’ll spar with you, Massa Lessing.”

“You won’t do no sucha thing!” Lou screamed, and reached out and snatched at his wet pants. Jeff walked past her like she wasn’t even there.

Lessing considered the boy who came to stand less than a foot away from him. He really wasn’t much different from the one who lay weeping in his mother’s lap.

Lessing circled Jeff. “Uh-huh. Hmmmm,” he said. “Well okay, then.”

Lou helped Jim to his feet, and together they moved from the center of the pen to its perimeter.

“Put your hands up,” Lessing instructed, and Jeff did.

Lessing began his dancing, kicking up dirt and boxing the air between them. Jeff narrowed his eyes and moved his hands up and in front of his face.

The first blow caught Jeff on his right cheek, sending him stumbling backward and into the fence. The second blow clipped his chin and hurled him to the ground.

Jeff knew that he was there to be a punching bag. That was an unspoken rule. But the third blow opened up something inside of him, and Jeff found himself punching back, catching Charlie Lessing squarely on the nose.

Lessing’s eyes bulged with surprise as he stumbled sideways and then came to a halting stop, bringing his hand up to inspect his nose. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Jeff stepped in and laid another shattering blow to Lessing’s cheek, then one squarely in his gut that sent the man tumbling to his knees, where he curled up into a shuddering ball of flesh.

The sun had blocked the first blow, and all Malroy caught of it was the sharp jerk of Charlie Lessing’s head and then his hand as it rose to investigate. It wasn’t until the second blow had been delivered that Malroy finally moved.

By the time Malroy drew back his arm, Jeff had landed the third punch that sent Lessing to his knees, spitting bright red blood all over his bare chest.

The whip missed Jeff by an inch and fell dead near his feet, where Jeff caught hold of it and began dragging Malroy toward him.

Lou knew that look in Jeff’s eyes. It was the same one Buena had kept at a simmer inside of him, but here it was boiling over and out of Jeff.

Jim began to clap and cheer his brother on, and Lou turned and slapped him across his face, then pulled him to her and buried his weeping eyes into her bosom.

She watched Lessing slowly gather himself, using the fence to pull himself into a standing position, blood glistening on his lips, his eyes on fire, and his skin a pulsating red. She watched him straighten his back and curl his fingers into fists and knew that the next time she would be able to hold Jeff in her arms, it would be after they cut his swinging corpse down from a tree.

Route 40

I slam the notebook closed.

What’s wrong?

I can’t take any more. It sounds too real.

Well that’s a good thing, she say. That’s how a novel is supposed to sound. Real.

Ain’t you got no heart?

Oh please, Dumpling, stop being so dramatic.

I want out of this SUV. I need to walk these visions out of my head. I look up and catch sight of a sign that says,
LITTLE ROCK, 120 MILES
.

I need to walk it off, walk off the worry I got for Jeff and Jim.

But ain’t no place to walk right now. I look down at the red cover of the notebook, and then back at the road.

I hear Jeff calling to me from the pages. I hear Lou crying.

Turn on the radio, I tells her sudden and loud.

Sherry give me a strange look and then press the button that make the music come out.

I lean back, try to let Diane Reeves’s voice sing over the wailing and whispers going on inside of my head, but Diane lose out, and I shake my head and say, Okay, okay.

What, Dumpling?

Nothing. Turn off that damn radio, I say, and flip the book open again.

___________________

Charlie Lessing licked the blood from his lips and spat it into the ground as he watched Malroy get the better of Jeff, catching him by his throat and squeezing so hard that Lou felt her own breath thin.

“Git down, boy!” Malroy demanded, and his grip tightened.

Jeff’s eyes rolled, and his tongue bulged as he struggled to remain standing.

“Git down, I say!” Malroy screamed again, and applied more pressure until Jeff’s body bent.

Malroy gave Jeff’s throat another good squeeze and then let go. He turned proudly around to face Lessing, whose face was a blanket of boredom.

“Now I . . .” Lessing started, and then his face contorted with surprise. Malroy couldn’t turn around quick enough, and so the blow caught him in the neck and sent him stumbling forward and into Lessing’s chest.

“Jeff!” Jim screamed, and took off behind his fleeing brother.

___________________

The hole was thirty-six inches deep and thirty-six inches wide. Just large enough to cradle Lou’s swollen belly.

“Get on down there, Lou,” Malroy ordered after he’d snatched the shovel from the young boy he’d ordered to dig the hole.

She got down on her knees.

It was late afternoon by then, and the sun was making its slow move west.

“Move closer,” Lessing commanded, then turned to Malroy. “She’s got to get closer,” he sputtered in frustration.

Lou bent over on all fours and crawled to the edge of the hole.

Lessing chewed on his bottom lip and watched. “You—you’re going to have to help her, Malroy,” he said, throwing his hands up. “She’s as big as a cow, for God’s sake.”

Malroy positioned himself on the opposite side of the hole, bent down, and, hooking his hands under Lou’s arms, took a deep breath and whispered, “Just relax.”

Lou let her arms go slack, and Malroy dragged her forward until her stomach was perfectly positioned over the hole and then eased her down.