Wash (3 page)

Once nightfall has swallowed the big barn with Wash inside it, Richardson turns away from the window toward the business at hand. He hides this particular book in a surprising place. A place so unlikely that he does not need a key for it.

This liquor cabinet was a gift from his godfather Thompson. Hip high and lovely, with a honeyed walnut lid rising to reveal a clutch of glass bottles, each nestled snug in its own padded compartment. The whole of it lined in midnight blue velvet scattered with stars. Old man Thompson had bought this cabinet in England with sugar money his family made down in the islands before they’d been driven out by mass uprisings. He’d bequeathed the liquor cabinet to Richardson in his will. Told him he would need it and he was right.

Everybody knows Richardson uses Wash as his traveling negro but nobody knows all the details, nor should they, is what he thinks. The squared box holding the bottles lifts enough for him to draw his secret book by its spine from this hidden compartment between the liquor above and the shelves of glasses below. Each broad page holds a span of time, covered with Richardson’s careful looping track. When, where, who and how much. Page after page, lying smooth and gilt edged inside their brick red leather binding. His eldest daughter Livia had given him this blank book several Christmases ago, back when she kept urging him to keep a daybook, but Richardson has found another use for it.

He sets his glass down on Miller’s unfolded banknote and lays the book open. Dips his pen into thick black ink which will fade over the years to an amber matching his liquor and writes
Sunday, August 17, 1823
. The date makes a roof over the column of names.

Minerva, Phyllis, CeCe, Molly, Dice, Charity, Vesta
.

Richardson leaves room for the information to come. In nine or ten months, he will return to this page, having sent for Miller’s midwife Pallas to bring him word. He will call her to this small room, shut the door behind her and wait for the details. Pallas will stand by the window, resting her gray eyes on the horizon as she trades him name for name.

Each woman, each child. Who lived, who died and when.

Richardson will mark it all down. He likes to keep track. Whenever he rides out, whether on business or just visiting, he makes it a point to pass through the quarters. Says he wants to see how they turn out. And most every time, he shakes his head, thinking, damn if they don’t all carry Wash, with those wide brows like wings over crisp dark eyes and lashes so thick and curled back that they look tangled.

Clear as day to Richardson, but it often seems he’s the only white man who catches the resemblance. He has never understood those who cannot tell negroes apart, especially their own. He wants to tell them, every single body possesses some distinguishing characteristic. You simply hunt for it until you find it. After that, it’s obvious.

As for the negroes, they are not sure what to make of Richardson. He catches some of the tricky bits but misses plenty of the easy ones. They know all about Quinn but they hear Richardson pulls his strings like a puppet, even if the two men are supposed to be partners.

How much, is what they want to know. And which is which? How much is Richardson, how much is Quinn and how much is Wash? That is the real question lying under everything like a high water table.

∞

It is a golden day in early September and still hot as the drought drags into its third month. A trio of Richardson’s neighbors have stopped by to take care of some business. Atkinson, Butler and Grange, ordering lots to be sent upriver from Richardson’s store in New Orleans. A set of dining room chairs, a saddle, three crates of Madeira and two dictionaries. They are also here to get in Wash’s book. Settle on some dates. The men walk together from the house to the barn to take a look even though they’ve used Wash before.

Richardson leads the way, half a head taller and older by thirty years than the other three but somehow the most vital of the group. The younger men turn to him continually for confirmation despite the fact that he rarely gives it. Richardson lets their chatter eddy around him as he scans his place, hunting for anything amiss.

The layout never fails to please him. The broad stone house built square on the highest point, well back from the rocky bluff over the river, with limestone-rich fields falling away from its flanks. Rows of cabins march off to the left while his garden sprawls toward the pond on the right with the biggest barn bridging the gap behind.

He had decided on stone for the house in 1792. Most of the early forts they built had been burned during Indian raids. After his brother David was ambushed and scalped by the Chickasaw, Richardson brought masons from Baltimore and had them build vertical slits into the thick stone walls on each side of the upper floors so he could lock his house up tight yet still lower a rifle barrel down through those deep narrow grooves.

He made room for two enormous underground cisterns close to the house while saving the biggest elms for shade. But he broke with custom by fitting all the necessaries inside the house itself. His initial reasoning had been for protection but he didn’t like lots of little outbuildings crowded close around the house. Said it always looked to him like a hen with chicks.

So he built the kitchen inside and the smokehouse too. With a loft for Emmaline wedged between the kitchen ceiling and the floor of his drinking smoking room upstairs. Waist high is not room enough for her to sit up in, but he said she could do her sitting in the kitchen since she seems to do most of her sleeping in there anyway.

He heads now for his biggest barn. Only one of its tall double doors stands open so the four white men step into darkness, jostling one another in momentary blindness. As they walk through the dim aisle to gather in the doorway on the far side, curious horses swing their heads to look over stall doors. Wasps rise and fall, trailing a buzzing drone, and pigeons coo relentlessly no matter how many times Richardson has Wash destroy their nests.

Wash stands high in the bed of a hay wagon, breaking apart the enormous bale that Richardson ordered from Cincinnati to tide them through the drought. Wash feels the men behind him but he does not turn from his work, choosing to focus instead on the solid heft of the pitchfork in his grip. The smooth way the sharp tongs slide into the densely packed hay. His fingers wrap tighter around the worn wooden handle as he listens to the men talk about him, thinking to himself, these men like to stand around talking. Easiest thing for him to do is to stay busy. Keep his back to them.

He straightens up and takes the pitchfork in both hands, tines turned toward him so he can use it more like a shovel or a hoe, raising it high then stabbing it deep into the bale to break off chunks before tossing them onto the small square platform he will winch up to his loft to unload. He sets down the pitchfork and picks up the harpoon-shaped hay hook. Stabs it deep into the rest of the bale then draws it out to check for mold.

Just as Wash knew he would, Atkinson asks Richardson, “Don’t you worry about him getting after somebody with that hay hook?”

After a long pause, Wash hears Richardson say in his dry quiet voice, “Then what, Atkinson? Where will he go then, except straight to the gallows, with parts missing after a long and bloody day?”

Wash knows without looking that Atkinson’s mouth has puckered shut. Feeling the men still watching him, he stops himself from shaking his head as he thinks about Richardson. Salty old dog. Wash sets his knees and his back, takes a breath and heaves a bigger chunk from the floor of the wagon onto the adjoining platform in one fluid motion.

The men continue talking, with Richardson telling Atkinson, “You must keep an eye out. And carry that knife even when you’re sure you won’t need it.”

Richardson’s knife is thick and flat but short, riding at the back of his right hip, nestled in a sheath strung on a thin calfskin belt that too often slides down inside the waistband of his britches, soaking with sweat then drying out again until it stiffens and threatens to crack. His wife Mary used to take this belt from its hook in their wardrobe, rubbing it between her hands with oil to supple it while she watched him dress. Now that they’ve virtually gone their own ways, Richardson has Ben oil the belt for him, along with his boots.

Richardson continues, “Just make sure they know you have it and that you’ll use it. It’s a waste of time if you don’t make it clear that you plan on taking one with you when you go.”

As soon as the words leave his mouth, Nero comes into his mind, just as vivid as Mena did the other day. Richardson rubs the back of his neck and Butler starts nodding because he knows what Richardson is seeing. He likes the Nero story and has told it often but Atkinson and Grange look confused so Butler takes over, talking through the sudden quiet and jerking his shoulder toward Richardson as he tells it.

“You never did see that negro he bought in New Orleans? He just about carved himself a new road to China, right through the middle of that boy.”

Atkinson does remember that negro. Tall, looming and fine. Except for that look in his eye.

Butler’s voice rises. “That Nero’d kill you just as soon as look at you.”

Atkinson and Grange shake their heads as the story comes back to them.

“How the hell you think that Nero ended up in New Orleans all the way from Virginia in the first place? That’s about as far downriver as you can get sold. And likely as he was, nobody would even bid on him except for our Richardson here. Forever indulging his weakness for the fine ones, no matter what we try to tell him. Thought he’d found himself a bargain.”

Grange looks over at Richardson standing quietly in the open mouth of the barn door. His hands are clasped behind him as he toes a small stone over to the doorjamb so it won’t be there for any of his horses to step on. He holds his eyes on the ground, except for quick glances over at Butler.

Richardson flinches to hear Butler tell it, especially in that enthusiastic way of his. People had warned him he’d have nothing but trouble from Nero. And sure enough, within three months of bringing him home, there Richardson stood, face to face with him, Nero’s hands wrapped around Richardson’s throat and Richardson’s knife buried in Nero’s low belly up to its hilt. In the middle of the morning. Right in his own damn barnyard.

The shock of it. The feeling of his windpipe closing off. The surprise of actually being ready. How quickly his palm wrapped around the haft of his knife. The tautness of Nero’s belly, his knife pushing through flat muscle to the inside of Nero’s hip bone. How close they stood. The sweat beading on Nero’s lip. Having to punch his knife hard to reach the softness underneath. Having to saw back and forth, pulling the hole bigger and bigger, until he felt the strength start to ebb from Nero’s grip. Then the sweet rush of breath he was finally able to draw. Even now, Richardson’s face twists in anger as he thinks of Nero’s body sprawled out on the ground in front of him. Nero’s blood all down his front, warm and slick, drying to sticky on his hands.

“Damn waste that was. Completely unnecessary,” he hears himself say.

After a pause, he adds, “But if it had to happen, just as well that it happened in front of a bunch of mine. I told those that were standing there staring, I said you take this back to the quarters with you. And wherever else you might get to go too.”

Butler whistles low, slapping Richardson on the back in open admiration, saying, “You keep yours headed in a straight line, don’t you?”

Richardson looks at them in their weak boyish eagerness and he’s disgusted. They don’t see. They don’t see anything at all. He never should have had to kill Nero. It was one of his more serious missteps, and he was damn lucky that in the three short months Nero was here, he’d been so disagreeable that no one had taken to him. So he had no ties, no kin, no one to take up his cause.

Richardson can still see Nero lying fallen with that great hole torn in his middle. Even then, he had such grace. Long muscled legs. Big hands with thick fingers, squared off at their ends. Honey brown eyes staring out from under broad wings of eyebrows.

He remembers the first time he saw Nero, standing off to himself, scanning the horizon rather than looking at the ground like the others. Richardson even remembers imagining what Nero’s get would have been like. Magnificent. He starts to wonder whether he may have bought Nero while searching for some fine and unbroken version of Wash. Richardson steers away from this thought before it has a chance to surface and drags his mind back to the group.

“I don’t think I’d ever seen a more likely negro. Bought him as a second stockman to go along with Wash here, then had to listen to Quinn complain the whole way home about what a mistake I was making.”

The men chuckle because they can imagine the long ride from New Orleans with Richardson and Quinn on each other’s nerves the whole way despite Nero himself being sent upriver later along with the furniture.

“The only thing wrong with Nero was, he had no regard for his own personal safety. Hell, maybe Quinn was right. Negroes like him can stir up a great deal more trouble than a hardheaded horse. And quicker too.”

“End up deader too,” Butler adds but Richardson cuts him off.

“I was tempting fate. Anyway, take yourselves to the house and get something to drink. I’ll be right behind you.”

The men file out of the barn into the late light as Richardson watches Wash send the last load of hay up to his loft with long even pulls on the winch rope. Wash has been working so steadily the visitors have forgotten about him. As Richardson turns to go, he wonders whether he’s the only white man who understands that negroes hear everything, just like everybody else.