Wash (25 page)

“What the hell?”

I look right at him and I say, nothing. It wasn’t nothing. Bucket fell off the shelf and she spooked is all.

He looks at me. He runs his eyes over everything till they catch on the rasp hanging from the center post.

“What’s this?”

I just look at him.

He reaches out, wrenches the rasp loose with one hand and sets it down on the trunk where it was lying before. Never takes his eyes off me.

“Everything all right in here?”

I’m nodding yessir, with the calming down horses stamping and snorting all through the barn. He looks at me a minute longer but I guess he don’t see nothing cause he turns to go back up to the house, shaking his head.

Richardson

I’d set Wash to working the horses in the beginning because he seemed to have a gift, but I had to pull him out of the barn after the first few years. That temper of his snaked out one time too many and Ben was finished with him.

“Half the horses in this barn head shy from the way that boy gets after em.”

“It only takes once,” Ben kept saying, as if I didn’t know that already. “It only takes once to wipe away years of work, just as sure as a wet rag.”

Ben wanted Wash out of the barn and I couldn’t blame him, especially after Queenie spooked on account of being manhandled, we both knew by Wash. I’d sent for Hobbs’s man Homer to come trim her feet right, but it only took her five minutes to shy away from him then rear up and fall over backwards, breaking her neck after having given us only the one foal. All that careful time we spent bringing that mare into this world and all those fine foals yet to come from her, all of it gone.

I watched Ben backing our big draft gelding through the barn door so he could hitch him to Queenie’s body and drag it out to be buried.

“Question is, what the hell do I do with him now, Ben?”

And Ben shook his head, saying I don’t know and I don’t care but I want him out of this barn today.

I set Wash to work in the field but by day two, he’d sent the pickax into his own instep then worked until dusk in the mud so the foot festered. Almost had to come off. Seemed like Wash was determined to pull himself under, if for no other reason than the satisfaction of taking money from my pocket.

Every single thing I put him to backfired. Finally, in a fit of anger, I carried him off to sell. But nobody bid. Atkinson was fond of reminding me that most people stay too busy to put up with such a troublesome negro. They had heard about Wash and knew better than to spend their money on him.

I had to bring him straight back home with me. And he looked pleased about it the whole way. Burned me right up. Like he was spitting in my face. Seeing how much he could cost me. Breaking my tools and fighting other people’s negroes just to make me pay the fine, digging his heels in and making a damn show out of every time he refused to do right.

He even made me give him the stripes, knowing I pride myself on not having to. He knew how each lashing, even when well earned, unsettles everybody on my place. Raises old buried grudges like hackles on a dog’s back.

But Wash’s favorite way of messing with me used to be his whoring around, especially once he saw how much trouble he could make for me with all the mammas coming to me to complain. Even after I sent him to the fields. Maybe more so.

At my wit’s end, I went to Mena to ask for some help. But my time for going to her was long gone and she looked right through me. Even as I was asking her, I could see her thinking you should have known better. You should have known better all along.

I could see her deciding I am done with helping white folks. Time to let whatever will happen here go ahead and happen. Then she looks at me through my talking at her and says, “I am through. You hear me? Through with it.”

I should have paid more attention to Wash. To him and to everything else. But I remained obsessed with chasing my good name through a past that wouldn’t stand still while we sank ever deeper into the hole. We’d just lost our second cotton crop in a row and the drought was running into its third month while prices for negroes rose steadily.

When Quinn came to me, wanting to get us into the breeding business, I already knew Wash was an unlikely choice. But he was like catnip to the girls and that R brand made sure he couldn’t run off easily. I needed to make him do something and I’d tried everything else.

Bennett said he heard about a man back East who was doing it but he didn’t see why. Too many negroes there already and the land was depleted. The market was out here with us. Some had started walking theirs west to sell but the journey wore them down.

And Bennett had a girl named Nelle. Good worker and sturdy but kept too much to herself. Wouldn’t settle down and start breeding. Wouldn’t let any of his men near her. I bet him that Wash would be able to get near her. Nearer than near. And he did. So it was a gamble at first and it went from there.

Wash

I used to go to the girls cause I liked em and I liked liking em. But after I saw Richardson tucking Bennett’s money into his waistband, saying Nelle, good, I will mark it down, that’s when I started to slide. It wasn’t about me and the girls anymore. It was about me and Richardson. Seemed like everything everywhere was about me and Richardson.

Sometimes, I thought I could hear Rufus trying to tell me something. Show me some way through. But it was dim like an echo and fading. Whatever he was trying to tell me was good and true but it was not here and now. All I could do was shake my head on my new wide shoulders and charge at things, breaking as much as I could.

And you bet I made Richardson give me the stripes. I wanted to make sure he’d have trouble selling me and he did. Most he could do with me was loan me out and he did that before I was ever even born.

But he couldn’t never break his bond with me. That bond with me was one he made with my mamma on that day he raised his hand for her. And I knew he saw her in me and it meant he couldn’t turn his back on me. Couldn’t walk away, even if he wanted to.

She always said you can tell a lot about a person by watching the way they act. She studied those men milling round during the sale, those men thinking they were the ones doing the shopping. She looked and she watched till she found her eye drawn to the one man she was hunting. A man whose manner went several layers deep and not just a coating.

She picked Richardson like she picked my daddy. My mamma picked and chose as careful and sure as walking a fence pole. And she let him know she had. Said it’s a rare person who can walk away from somebody seeing some good in you and counting on it.

That’s what she did to him. She counted on the good in him. She said without saying, I see you seeing me. And sure enough, he looked at her and he saw her and he raised his hand for her. And he kept her. Hired her out instead of selling us. For all those years. And sent for us soon as he got home.

She told me she knew all along, just like he’d had to buy her, he’d hang on to me. Said she could tell he knew his own kind well enough to know right away, soon as he saw me, what I’d bring out in em. He knew I’d make em knock me back over and over till I didn’t get up anymore cause I can’t learn to look away.

∞

Richardson walks through the speckled light falling under the trees onto the thick short grass. The old man moves in a way that makes everybody else seem like they are standing still. A sleek hull cutting through water. Looking, seeing, sizing up. And always carrying that list in his mind, parceling out tasks and chores to just the right people with just the right amount of detail. This way of his is what has kept most of his people on the job. His seeing what skill they have. Seeing it, calling on it, expecting it. Somehow his seeing them like that feels like respect, even though all he’s telling them is how to put more money in his pocket.

It can be hard to catch his attention as he stalks through the day. He’s impatient because he wants everything sorted out well in advance of any situation that might arise. His mind feels clean to him, like a scythe. Even if it falls too quickly at times, often before the request has been fully voiced.

What Richardson has worked to learn, both from his father and from Thompson, as well as from his years of experience, is to discern the rule lying buried within the situation. Sort the exceptions from the rule, keeping these to a minimum. Weigh the costs of making the exception against its benefits and then decide. This is painstaking work and thankless, requiring what feels to Richardson like eternal vigilance. Throughout most of his life, he has had no doubt that he was earning his privileges through the carrying out of his responsibilities.

Wash watches Richardson from where he sits seething in the shadow of an overhang. Stewing over what happened with Nelle. All that sweetness and sugar turned to money in Richardson’s pocket. Wash can’t find one way of being himself without Richardson managing to turn it to his advantage. Whenever Wash takes hold of life like his mamma keeps telling him to, seems like Richardson finds some way to snatch it right from his hands.

Feels to Wash like it’s time for him to start taking. And he has. He misses that mare Queenie, even as he savors having taken something from Richardson for once. And he knows what he wants to take hold of next. He wants to take that hawkish face in his hands and squeeze all the lean life from it. Everything Wash is and knows keeps shrinking down into that one thirsty pull.

Even as he remembers Rufus telling him don’t let your mind slip into that smooth groove, it feels too good. He thinks of Cleo gone and Rufus without her but still, he lets his mind trace his want like a scent. Wondering when that day will come to pass. Seems like he won’t even have to make it happen. It’s just going to come his way, float right downriver until there it is, just in front of him, well within reach. Somehow. Sometime.

He moves up and down the rows of cotton and tobacco, or else he sits under an overhang in the quarters, just far back enough to stay in shadow, and he lets his mind go wherever it wants. He hears Mena trying to draw him close but he keeps his back to her.

And through the blur of each day tumbling past him full of work and worry, Richardson senses the catch and pull of Wash studying him without really knowing what it is. Just a vague distant underwater sort of tugging. At first, Richardson assumes it’s some task needing doing that keeps slipping his mind.

But soon enough, he realizes it’s Wash watching him. Richardson knows this is what happens when you give a man a life he cannot hook himself into. Cut off from anything to want or anything to have, all the man has the time or inclination to do is watch you. His watching you day in and day out is enough to drive you clean out of your mind. Nor is it safe.

Richardson decides to override Ben’s wishes by putting Wash back with the horses. He wants to see whether Wash and the new chestnut stud bought as a bargain last week can find a way to knock some sense into each other. He senses Wash spoiling for a fight and decides it better be with that horse instead of with him.

Most everybody else on the place had shrugged their shoulders when he sought recruits to work with the new horse, shaking their heads to say no thank you and sweeping the barn aisle thoroughly so Richardson would see they were being good workers despite their refusing his request. He saw they were afraid and he did not blame them. They had heard the squeal and seen the head toss that broke Ben’s shoulder on the first day. Heard Ben’s body hitting the wall and seen him come scrambling over it. They may have found a way to smile about that story by now but they’re none too eager to step into that stall themselves.

When Richardson goes to the quarters to tell Wash what he has decided, Wash maneuvers Richardson into the sun while he stands in the shade. As usual, Richardson can’t quite read Wash’s face. The older man pauses before he turns to go, holding the dollar in such a way that Wash ends up reaching to take it without its ever being fully offered. Nodding yes, he’ll give it a whirl as he watches Richardson walk back to the house.

The next morning, Richardson and Wash stand outside the second stall of the stud barn. Both doors shut. Top and bottom. Richardson has kept the chestnut stud the whole week without food and a full two days without water. Says it’s the only way he’ll let somebody close enough.

Richardson holds a loop of thick rope weighted with heavy hooks at both ends. Wash holds a bucket of water with a bucket of grain sitting there waiting. There’s a long thin slot in the wall of the stall, just above two more buckets tied inside, close to the corner.

Soon as Wash pours the water through the slot into one bucket, he’s supposed to pour the grain into the other bucket. His doing this should give Richardson just enough time to step inside the stall and hook the rope to the wall, with a loop around the horse’s middle so he can’t break his neck from pulling back. The trick will be Richardson stepping out in time.

A small group of stable hands has gathered to watch but Richardson ignores them. Wash stands next to him, feeling the weight of the water bucket pulling on his arm and wondering how this will go. Whenever Richardson moves close, time slows down.

Wash wonders whether he will pour the water and the grain like he is supposed to but then bolt the door behind Richardson so he can’t get back out of the stall. Even tied to the wall, the stud can likely do some damage. But then Wash feels those eyes on him, watching him standing there next to Richardson. Wash can see those same stable hands, none of whom like him very much anyway, sitting in the courtroom telling the judge everything that happened and then walking home to get that dollar. He decides no for now.