Those Across the River

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I WOKE UP in a cage, naked, outside.

It was morning. It was cold. My head hurt like it was sitting in a socket of cold, broken glass. A curious chicken just outside the iron bars cocked its head so it could see me with its preferred eye.

“Good morning,” I said to it.

I sat up, noticing first how white my legs looked and then that they had rust stains from the bottom of the cage. I had a very civilized and unnecessary urge to cover my private parts, but there was not so much as a handkerchief in the frigid cage. There was not enough room to stand, or to fully extend my legs.

I looked at the chicken again.

“Would you please tell management that I would like to be moved to a better room?”

It walked off disinterestedly.

“I’ll have your job,” I said.

I knew where I was, though I scarcely believed it.

I knew where I had to be.

Despite the murderous pain in my head, I looked around and took stock of my situation. A grey, ancient smokehouse sagged just to my left. Near it stood a sort of round wooden disk. The fact that everything was blurry informed me that my glasses were gone.

To my right, a low stone wall defined the limit of what appeared to be an overgrown garden. Past that were rows of dilapidated shacks, swarmed over by kudzu and impaled by young trees.

This was all somehow familiar to me.

When I turned around and looked behind me, I knew why.

I saw it.

La Boudeuse.

The plantation of Lucien Savoyard, my great-grandfather.

Of course.

I turned around and looked at that wooden disk again, noticing this time the leather straps and buckles. Yes. This was the wheel on which Savoyard’s slaves had been flogged and tortured and spun until they were witless. I noticed that it was not overgrown.

“He awake,” a voice I recognized said. The Negro from last night. Not the strong, bald one. Bad haircut. He came over with a chipped bowl and stood over my cage with it.

“Open your mouth.”

I was thirsty enough to oblige and I drank as best I could the cold water he poured through the bars. I was shivering.

“I think the man cold,” he yelled back at the house. He seemed genuinely amused by this.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I said.

He looked at me.

He said the next thing very slowly.

“Cause we know who you are. We smell who you are. But don’t worry none. We’s the forgivin type.”

He stooped for the chicken that had been eyeing me and snatched it up by the neck, taking it inside with him, unconcerned with its beating wings. It took a moment for that to sink in. How fast he was.

It rained.

I had been testing the lock to the cage, bracing myself as best I could and pushing with both feet, hoping something might give. Something did, but it wasn’t in the door. I hurt my back.

“Goddamnit!” I said. That’s when I felt the first drops. “Goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit.”

Soon it was pouring.

I hugged my knees, watching the rain splashing in the muddy yard, trying to focus on that instead of the cold that was creeping through my body and the dull, tight pain above my right hip.

I saw a white foot tread in a puddle, and I looked up the leg and at its owner. The woman with the curly hair. Curly and matted. Naked, like me, standing in the rain. There was dried blood near her ear.

She had killed Buster.

“You’re handsome,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

She just stood there.

A beautiful woman with a wide, abundant thatch of hair on her pubis.

Slightly deflated breasts with huge nipples and brown areolas.

Someone’s mother.

The house was behind her, with its cupola and its balconies and mad growths of ivy. One of the upstairs French windows was open.

Then I saw her.

Eudora.

Her pale figure perfectly framed in the darkness of the interior.

Holding a bedsheet wrapped around her.

She looked out at me for a moment. I couldn’t make out her expression. Then a black hand was on her shoulder and she turned under her own power, and she went out of sight.

“She’s Hector’s,” the woman said.

“I see.”

“Good,” she said, and opened my cage.

She crawled in with me, entwined her limbs with mine, with her animal stink and her wild, tangled hair.

At first I tried not to let her, but it was like she was carved from warm oak. Her grip was unbreakable, even working against the thumb. She kissed me with her full lips and her rotten, hot breath, and I kept my mouth closed against her until she used her hand to force my mouth open. I bit her lip so hard my canines touched through it, and she jerked away from me, ripping the soft tissue open so a little part of her lip hung; the wound bled onto her chin in the rain. She laughed softly, like we were kids hiding in a tree house with a dirty secret. Drops of her blood fell on my chest and mixed with rainwater. She licked at where I bit her, taking her blood back into herself, and soon the bite was gone.

“You tryin to make me bite you back, huh? You want me to turn you? I might, pretty man, ’cept he said not to. But I will do this.”

She broke my ring finger.

I think she would have broken my little finger, but I didn’t have one on that hand.

I was so numb and cold and crazy it didn’t really hurt.

It didn’t matter.

She started putting mud all over us. It was smooth and sticky, more like clay. She warmed it on her crotch, then used it to get me hard.

She stuck me in her dirty like that and rode me until I came.

Then she slept on me and I was glad to be warm.

It just didn’t matter.

IT GOT TO be near dark and Mustache brought me dinner and a horse blanket. I had the impression somebody had a powwow and decided I might die of cold, and, for whatever reason, I wasn’t wanted dead. Not quickly, anyway. Dinner was roasted chicken, no doubt my friend from the morning. The funny thing was, I was so exhausted and deranged that I felt emotional about it. Like the chicken had suffered despite its innocence. I cried and ate it crying. It was poorly cooked and red near the bone. It occurred to me that perhaps they weren’t used to cooking things here.

When it was full dark, Curly Woman came and got me.

“He wants to see you.”

I wrapped up in the blanket and went with her into the big, wrecked plantation house, noticing now the flaking paint and bullet holes and how there was no glass in most of the French doors. We came in through the dining room. Candles burned and spilled wax on a once-magnificent table where a carved peacock’s jeweled eyes had been knifed out, probably by Union soldiers. I noticed that the candleholders were rusted Civil War–era bayonets jammed into the wood. She removed a candle and used it to light my way past the stairs now; I noticed a depression where the steps had been stove in by a cannonball at the end of its momentum, then crudely replaced. A groove in the fine wood floor betrayed its trajectory, how it had skipped like a giant skee-ball. The Yankees who occupied La Boudeuse after the slave uprising had shelled it for sport when they left. This was like a temple to madness.

In the hallway, we walked past rotted tapestries and, because I looked at them, she graciously stopped and held the candle so I could see the motif. Eighteenth-century laborers hardly laboring at all. How different must have been the scene out the window that gave onto the fields; slaves toiling bent-backed in the sun, tearing their fingers on the rough plants while, inside, in dyed silk, French shepherds lolled on rocks under shade trees. The master at his desk, the mistress at her loom and the house nigger pulling on the fan cord.

HE WAS IN the library. The big, bald colored from the town square. The one who sniffed at me and stared at Dora. The one they had gone to lynch. She squatted near him now, at his feet, not looking up at me at first. Then she did and her eyes filled with tears and she looked down again, wiping her eyes with the end of her dress. Her own dress was on her now, but unwashed. His concubine. I saw my pistol on the small table that also held his ashtray. He was smoking a cigar, wearing a silk robe. The robe was opened on his broad, muscular chest, and I noticed that he was branded. A fleur-de-lis inside the lower loop of an S.

Savoyard.

“You were right,” he said to the woman. “He is pretty.”

I clutched the blanket tighter, afraid they were going to strip it off me.

“I want you to look at me, nigger,” he said to me. “You are most definitely my nigger now. I think you know that. But I mean to make sure. You are too young to have known your kin, Old Marse Savoyard. But I knew him. I belonged to him. And I killed him. But killing doesn’t end some things.”

“He was evil,” I said. “Now it looks like you are. Hector. That’s your name, right?”

“He was more than evil. He was turned. I figured it out. But I was turned killing him. With that.”

He pointed with his cigar to what looked like a small harpoon hanging above the bookcase. It had a shiny tip.

“And my name is Hector, but you won’t call me that again. My name is not for you. I’ll take a tooth out of your head if you say it. I got pliers I made myself. I was your kin’s blacksmith.”

Blacksmith. I looked down at his arms and hands and noticed the burn scars on them.

“He ran niggers out in the woods on the full moon and chased them, cause you have to chase something. Man and a woman every month. People around here thought he was a speculator, buying slaves and selling them again. But they didn’t go anywhere. Just out in those woods and in his belly. We used to sing hollers about the moonshine killing us, but called it the sunshine so Marse wouldn’t know what we were singing about. We knew it was a monster killing us. Knew there were two of them. Him and this boy that stayed out in the woods. We were all scared of the boy. Used to come lookin at us through our windows at night and we’d say if the yellow boy caught your eye, you were next to die.

“But one day I was talking to the house nigger who said how Marse ate with brass spoons and forks and I got thinking about why he wouldn’t use silver like everyone else. Some of the slaves was Creole, from New Orleans, had belonged to his daddy. They said he was his daddy, his own daddy. Said the boy in the woods was his boy, followed him from Louisiana, and my nose tells me that’s true. Said Marse was real old, two hundred years or more, that he came from France. He liked to fight in wars because he was hard to kill. Got to be a hero instead of a monster. Paid the doctors to cut his wives barren so he could pretend to die, then show up as his son and inherit his own money.

“He didn’t mind having bastards, though, cause bastards don’t inherit. Like your granddaddy. Like the boy. Funny, though. That makes the boy your kin, too. Your yellow little great-uncle who spends more time on four legs than two.”

This struck him funny.

I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because it’s going to get bad for you, and I want you to know why. I hope you appreciate what a gift that is. So much happens in life and the reasons are hidden from us. But you’re mine now and you’re going to understand why your life is given into my hand.”

“I don’t understand why you hate me so much. I never did anything to you.”

“Nigger, I don’t hate you. I hate him. But I can’t hurt him no more.”

“The boy’s his kin, too.”

“The boy’s one of us. Even if he keeps to himself. Once you’re turned, you’re one of us. You want to be one of us?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Because if you said yes, I was going to make you beg me to turn you. Then if you did, I was going to eat your eyes out of your head because you were already broken. You still have a little spirit, so you get to stay alive awhile. But I was thinking about that silverware. I knew Marse would run me. One day I tested him. He was back from the war, and wouldn’t turn loose of us. He had fought Uncle Billy’s soldiers off and I thought maybe he was planning to kill us all and run. He came to see his horse, which I had just shod, and I gave him a silver dollar I had hoarded up. Said I found it in the ground, but it was his ground, so it was his dollar. He put a glove on before he took it and I knew Holy silver could kill him. Used my other two dollars to make that sticking pole up there and got preacher to pray over it. Put silver on pitchforks, too. And a scythe. All of us went, women, too. He shot four dead. If I had a pretty gun like yours, I wouldn’t have had to get that close. He wouldn’t have bit me dying. None of this would have happened.”

“If it’s worth anything, I wish none of it had,” I said.

“You know the best word I got from all Marse’s books? Alas. That is a good word. Full of helplessness and beauty. And that is the word I have for you. Alas. Now you will go back to your cage and I will enjoy your wife again. By the way, I think you should know that she came here alone. I was going to go into town and take her. But she knew what she was now. And she came to be with her own.”

THE NEXT DAY I had what a historian of the States’ War might regard as a unique and completely undesirable opportunity to study the past firsthand; I was flogged with a bullwhip. Hector oversaw it, but I could tell he wasn’t going to swing the whip himself. The black man with the bad haircut tied me to a tree while Hector smoked a homemade cigar and chuffed foul clouds about his head. He was almost genial, asking me where I was born, did I have any brothers. I thought about Johnny. I didn’t answer. The other man turned me and tied me and Hector whistled appreciatively at the shrapnel scars on my back.

“Where’d you get these, boss?”

“Potato masher,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“What, don’t you mash potatoes down here?”

“Alright. That sass is alright. But you had better be respectful when I ask you to say the names of the ones your great-granddaddy put down. Because I’m feeling generous, I will only give you one lash for every dead friend.”

“Say Mittie,” he said.

Silence.

The Negro hit me with a bullwhip, making a sick, wet sound and hurting as bad as anything I can remember.

Whack!

I whimpered.

“Nigger, this man’s gonna hit you til we get through twelve names. And that’s just today. Miss Mittie died of fever cause Marse’s overseer wouldn’t let her rest when the corn had to come in, and didn’t let us chop wood and make a fire cause he wanted us strong for the corn. Now say Mittie like you miss her, too.”

“Mittie.”

Whack!

“Say Oscar.”

“Oscar.”

Whack!

“Hey, that was good!” the man whipping said. “I almost feel like he mean it. Don’t worry, nigger, I don’t know no Oscar neither.”

And so it went.

In the end, I got fourteen lashes, and the skin was lain open. It felt like my scars had split. Then they shackled me to that goddamned wheel and spun me until I was half nuts. I was making noises I couldn’t reproduce now if I had to. I was talking, but I don’t remember what I said. This went on for a long time. When they were ready to take me down, some of my wounds had begun to dry. They had to peel me off the wheel. Then they stuck me back in the cage where I put my belly down on the rust-flaking iron and sobbed until I passed out, thinking that at least I was at the bottom of it.

The very bottom.

Well, if God is up there, He’s a real card. He must split His Holy paunch laughing when one of us speaks in such superlatives. Because the bottom can always, and I mean always, be lowered.

I WAS AWAKENED by burning.

Mustache was standing on my cage pissing on me.

I just lay there, laughing under him.

He laughed, too, then he said, “My laughin’s cuz it’s funny to piss on somebody. Maybe you laughin cuz it’s funny to get pissed on. I don’t reckon to find out. Now wait for the shake. Alright. Sweet dreams, punkin.”

Then he left me alone and it got dark again, and cold.

I didn’t even bother with the wet horse blanket.

I focused all my energies on a new and important mission.

But, try as I might, I couldn’t die.

IN THE EARLY hours of the morning, I was visited. I came to slowly, then started shivering so hard I could hear the cage rattling a little. I was aware of a presence, and I cocked my head and saw that the stars were cut out in the shape of a strong man with a bald head. Hector. He was like a field of darkness, sitting Indian style.

“Why did you come to this place?” he said.

“What place?” I said in a pathetic little croak.

“Georgia.”

“I was writing a book.”

“About what?”

I couldn’t remember. Then I could.

“About you. About the slaves. Killing my great-grandfather.”

The end of his cigar glowed as he drew in, then let out a puff of smoke that made the stars shiver.

“Maybe I should let you go write that book. Would it be a good book?”

“Yes. It would have been.”

“But you weren’t there. It would be lies.”

“It still would have been good.”

He grunted and drew at his cigar again.

“How would you imagine that he died? Bravely, or like a coward?” Hector said.

“I don’t care anymore.”

“Guess.”

“Both. Like everybody.”

He grunted again.

“Yes, both. Bravely until he felt the silver burn him. Then he turned wolf and ran. But we had him cornered. So he turned man again to die. And even though the spear was through him, he bit my face. So I could be this. His gift to me.”

“Why don’t you fall on your spear?” I said. “Like a noble Roman.”

He drew on the cigar again, then casually moved the burning end towards my eye. I turned at the last second and he only burned the skin near my eyebrow. I moved to the other end of the cage.

“It was a pleasure speaking with you,” he said.

And he was gone.