Gloryland (24 page)

S
omething was eating away at Private First Class Bledsoe, something you couldn’t see, but it got so’s you could feel a bite in the air whenever he was around.

All of us got darkness, holes inside where you don’t want light to go, but Bledsoe’s was beginning to show on the outside. It was in his attitude, in his voice, the way he moved, how he answered when you called his name, and it was beginning to interfere with his soldiering. It got harder and harder for him to give an order and take one. I guess he’d been taking so much all his life, he just got full up. How much can you take before you start falling apart inside like a house with wood rot or termites, the damage invisible until it all crashes down?

I was taught that pain makes calluses, rough leathery skin spreading over what’s tender, but sometimes even that skin can split open and bleed. I still don’t really understand what happened to Bledsoe. All I know is that one moment four of us, myself, Bledsoe, McAllister, and Bingham, were standing on the edge of a meadow swatting at mosquitoes in the country north of the Tuolumne River, a place where there were more rocks than trees, with a mild breeze blowing past. And while I was thinking what a beautiful day it was, I was also thinking about how to pull Bledsoe out of the hole he’d put himself into and where he lay silent and raw.

All I’d asked him to do was help dig a latrine for our camp that night, cause we didn’t have enough time to make it to the post, and it was a reasonable thing to ask a private to do, should’ve been expected after all his years in the army. It was just an order like a thousand
others I’d given, and even McAllister thought it was wrong for Bledsoe to argue about doing his job, but the whole time he was swelling up to bust, and we couldn’t see it cause we were so caught up in being annoyed at him.

One minute I was staring up at the sky, hoping for a little rain to cool me off, pushing the conversation to one side of my head the way you sweep a floor clean. The next minute an arm was round my neck, and I felt something hard and cold pressed against my right temple.

I lost my balance. I couldn’t breathe, and my hands went out by themselves trying to find something to grip, but there was only air. I could see McAllister with his lower jaw dropped, and Bingham staring at me like I was Jesus come back. Since I couldn’t see Bledsoe, I figured it was his arm round my neck, his stinky breath in my face, and his regulation Colt revolver pressed against my head.

He cocked it. The click was loud, louder than the wind in the trees and the meadow, louder than the creek. Even my heart, which was beginning to pound, was quieter than the cocking of that pistol.

He didn’t say nothing, I couldn’t get any breath to talk, and McAllister and Bingham were too surprised, I guess. The conversation we’d been having was over, and the next one looked like it would be short. We were way past words anyway. If talk was a country we’d been visiting, we had crossed the border to someplace else. There were only two choices.

Either Bledsoe’d blow my brains out or he wouldn’t.

All I heard was breathing and the wind in the grass and the whisper in the red firs, the one that comes from nothing and fades to nothing. There were a few birds singing, not a lot cause it was getting close to twilight. A few clouds were passing over, and I could’ve sworn they slowed down as they passed, as if they were trying to get a better look at what was happening below.

Except for not getting much air, I wasn’t too bad off. In a way it was just like being back in South Carolina. Every day of my life there, something I could only see part of was squeezing my throat
and breathing down my neck. This here was just the feel of an arm round my throat cutting off air. It was a feeling of floating in and out of things. It was the knowledge that a cocked pistol was pressed up against my skull, and that my life could end at any time. I was used to this. Bledsoe was just reminding me that this was my life, days and nights of being out of breath, feeling I had no control of anything round me, and Death always right behind me with a gun to my head and his bony finger on the trigger.

Yeah, I’d been here before. And I knew without thinking that if I moved, he’d pull the trigger. If Bingham or McAllister moved, he’d pull the trigger. He had all the power, and that’s what all this was about.

Back at Fort Robinson, we did drills that taught you to act and not think, cause thinking just clouds the issue at moments like this, and you were better off acting from instinct. So I did nothing.

And that was what saved my life. It was a lifetime of doing nothing, the longest ten or twenty minutes I ever spent. McAllister didn’t move. Bingham didn’t move. No one and nothing moved except the Sierra Nevada and everything else in it.

We must’ve presented a funny picture. Four colored soldiers standing stock-still at the edge of a meadow, surrounded by bare granite hills. Soldiers who weren’t talking, only staring at each other.

After a bit, I could feel the muscles in Bledsoe’s arm twitch and then begin to relax. I didn’t know if this meant he was about to let me go or he was just getting tired. Whatever the reason, all of a sudden I could breathe and my head started to clear.

I still did nothing, but doing nothing was something. Growing up in the South had taught me not to confuse fighting with surviving. Surviving didn’t mean backing down or lowering your head like a dog, it meant holding on like an oak in a flood. You put your roots down deep and gripped and let the water come. That’s surviving, and it’s what I was doing with Bledsoe. It’s what we were all doing. All of us knew about living in a world where we had no power. I’m here on this earth cause my family understood that the best way to
fight was just to survive. If you were born with a pistol to your head, the only way to fight was to make it to the next second, and that meant knowing what was in the head of the person whose finger was tightening on the trigger.

This gave me an advantage with Bledsoe. I knew and all of us knew what was in his head, cause we weren’t any different. The same acid gnawing at his gut was in ours too, we were just holding up better right then. Anyway, we all knew how it would turn out if we did nothing. We’d survive.

And that’s what happened.

After a few more minutes, Bledsoe got tired of holding that pistol to my head, and he dropped his arm. I stepped away from him, turned toward him. He was breathing hard, looking at the ground, and then he let the pistol drop. It fell to the ground with a dull thud like a stone.

He sat down next to it and began to cry. I reached down and picked up the Colt and tossed it to McAllister, who caught it and tucked it carefully under his belt. Then I sat down in front of Bledsoe. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t say anything to him, just sat there inches away, and he knew I was there. He was crying hard now.

McAllister and Bingham sat too, on either side of Bledsoe. They were angry and sad cause they knew he had just left the army by doing what he’d done, left the only real kin he had, and his life was about to get a helluva lot worse.

The last thing that man needed was more words, so we kept on saying nothing. We helped him get up, and to do that we had to put our arms around him. Once he was standing we could’ve let go, but we didn’t, and he didn’t seem to mind. We kept holding him up.

We should’ve been angry. Bledsoe could’ve killed me. But he didn’t. He was just mad and he couldn’t hold a pistol to the head of everyone who’d hurt him deeply, make them take notice. We were the only ones in reach. His brothers. His family.

We didn’t let go of him for a long time.

I
’d been in rough country before. The kind of country that leaves calluses on the bottom of your feet if you walk through it barefoot. The kind of terrain that’ll chew up a body and spit it out in the sun. I’d been there before.

But the worst place I’ve been in was Anger. Anger is a country inside, and I lived there so long I thought I’d never get out alive. It’s a place you can wander through asking all sorts of questions and getting very few answers. I built me a house there, and it had windows that looked out to nowhere and doors that wouldn’t swing out but only in. You couldn’t lock anything out, you could only lock yourself in. And my house was right in the middle of Anger.

Every night while I lived there, I’d lie in bed and pray to God bout why being colored was my fate in this life. I asked God why he was so cruel to do this to a little boy, and I yelled and screamed and cried inside so loud that I got to be like a bell so shaken by its own sound that it decided to never ring again.

I lived in Anger so long I forgot there were other places you could live. I didn’t notice that I had no neighbors and no friends. I didn’t notice that being alone was a place I’d built with my own hands. When you’re a good citizen of Anger, you’re stuck inside you, feeling sorry for yourself cause there ain’t nobody around to take up the slack. Nobody comes round to visit or see how you are. You don’t get no mail. There’s no newspaper cause there ain’t no news.

When you put down roots in Anger, you don’t get older but you don’t get any younger. You don’t ever get fat or skinny or sick with a cold. To catch a cold you got to be open a little, but you’re a boarded-up
house with doors and windows that don’t work right. Wind can’t get to you and the sun been gone so long you can’t even say “sun.” It’s dark all the time, which means no plants growing or animals to eat them. You’re the only living thing in the country, if you can call it living.

Kinda looks silly to build a fence round that lone house. Who or what are you keeping out? Or are you just that afraid of something busting down the door you nailed shut and showing you a road out of Anger?

Now that would be really scary. To bring the walls down. To break the windows into pieces. To shatter the door. To strip yourself naked of all the things you put on when you were angry and afraid. To walk out to the road without a stitch of clothing on and no need for modesty, cause there ain’t no one around to see you naked. You scared the world away and the sun away and life away, and everyone who ever thought they loved you away, so why not be free of everything and walk out of that country just like it was the day you were born?

I had this kinda argument with God for a lot of years while I was in Anger. For a long time I was yelling and crying so much I couldn’t hear what he was trying to say. But more and more I had trouble not hearing it. He was always talking about leaving Anger . . .

Now you’re scared, ain’t you, Elijah? It takes courage to move out of Anger, don’t it, boy? It’s easy living there, right? Cause it’s always someone else’s fault when something goes wrong, it’s never your fault, cause you a victim of a white man’s hate. You didn’t call yourself a nigger, did you? It was always someone else or something else that made you hurt, made you sick, made you want to die. But you were lying to yourself all those days and nights, lying to yourself and calling it prayers or hope or justice, calling it the Ku Klux or bigots or bastards, every curse you could find like stones lying on the ground waiting to be thrown. Lying to yourself, cause it was easier country to walk through than the truth.

If Anger is a flat empty land, and you the emptiest thing in it, then Truth is a country of high mountains that knows the feel of God’s
feet walking and God’s voice talking and God’s hands feeling everything that’s alive and not alive.

What was it made me see that I had to walk straight through Anger to the other side? What was it told me to get up and go away from the dark? What was it that reached inside me and pulled me to the outside and said “Live!” I don’t know, but I guess I walked out of Anger to find out.