God's Fool (29 page)

By the time he was eleven I had learned to pick my battles. When I found out, for example, that he had been spending time in the company of the blacks (by now he had struck up his friendship with Moses), I checked my natural reaction and wisely said nothing. The boy was a strong swimmer, I reasoned, and he wasn’t alone. Lewis, whom I could make out only as a faded pair of pants moving in and out of the shoreline greenery, always seemed to know where he was. Lewis would watch out for him.

No, as was more and more often the case where Christopher was concerned, I saw no particular reason to stand in his way. A small part of me even saw his side of the thing: with his cousin Samuel off to Leesburg for a month to visit his grandparents, that left only Patrick to play with, and Patrick, though decent to the core (and as obedient a son as any
father could hope for), was quite irredeemably dull. Not unlike his father, at times.

No one could say the same for Moses.

“Mornin’, Mistah Chang, Mistah Eng,” he would say, coming up to the porch where my brother and I sat trapped like clerks behind the old dining-room table (for this was already 1856 and my brother, thirsty for salvation, had determined to commit Charity Barnum’s red-leather edition of the King James Bible to memory). “I brought y’all this string of cats.” And swinging them out from behind his back, he would hold up a length of rope packed with yellow-bellied bullheads, tracing a string of drops in the dust around his feet.

At times his familiarity (a matter of tone more than anything else) overstepped its proper bounds. “This isn’t the kitchen,” I remember my brother saying curtly one Sunday morning when Moses appeared, interrupting him in the middle of his devotions.

The smile almost disappeared. I watched him tip his head slightly to the side and back—a gesture of resistance, even insolence, common to all men. “Yessuh, Mr. Eng,” he said. He shrugged: “I thought y’all might want to see ’em, is all.” And then, under his breath: “I knows where th’ kitchen is.” The instant the words were out of his mouth he knew he was in trouble. I could see it in his face, and, unaccountably, I felt sorry for him.

My brother’s head was up in an instant. For weeks now (goaded on by what he saw as my unforgivable laxness regarding Christopher) he had been going on, none too subtly, about the importance of maintaining proper relations with the blacks. Now he saw his chance. “What did you say?” he said, leaning us forward.

I couldn’t help myself. “He said he’s going to take them to the kitchen, brother,” I said, and then, to Moses: “Are you sure your mama doesn’t have any need of them?”

“No suh, Mr. Chang,” he said, recovering quickly. “She got plenty.”

“Well, bring them around,” I said, and then, just to turn the knife in my brother’s side a little: “They’ll make a fine breakfast.”

The bullheads, of course, were hardly the point. Nor would I have been inclined to excuse the boy’s tone had it not been for the greater good of getting my brother’s goat. A few weeks earlier, when Christopher had been found out and hauled out of bed by his mother in the middle of the night, my little brother had taken her side.

I hadn’t forgotten it. I had been asleep, dreaming that my brother and I were back on the stage. As we answered questions from the audience I kept looking at a kindly-looking older man in a white shirt, sitting in the fourth row with his hands on his knees. Something about the way he held himself, leaning slightly forward as though trying to pay attention, alert yet deferential—was familiar. I realized it was our father. He nodded at me—gave me a small, reassuring smile. I was about to call on him (though he hadn’t raised his hand) when I was distracted by sounds from somewhere outside the hall: a woman yelling something I couldn’t make out, and a strangely familiar crying. I felt a terrible uncertainty. I looked back at our father. He nodded at me, as though giving me permission, though for what, exactly, I didn’t know.

I jolted up, dragging my half-sleeping brother to a sitting position. It seemed to be coming from the boys’ bedroom. Wrapping a blanket around ourselves we ran upstairs, following the lamplight, where we found Addy (her sister next to her) holding Christopher by the ear, shaking his still-damp britches in his face. It was just after midnight. Shadows leaped and shrank against the wall. I could hear the baby crying. Down the hall I could see the children’s heads, like mushrooms on a tree, protruding from their doorways.

She had come to look in on them, she explained, and found him gone. Nearly frantic with worry, she had been at the point of waking up the household when she had heard the back door open and seen him creep up the stairs. Unable to think what it might mean, she had determined to wait till morning to confront him, but had found herself too agitated to sleep. There was no time like the present, after all. She would raise no liars, she said now, lifting him up till he yelped. No, sir. There would be no liars in the Bunker house.

That was when my brother entered into it. He had counseled against
it, he said. He had argued against it, not once, but a dozen times. It was unnatural. A corrupting influence. But I wouldn’t listen.

Addy turned to me, still holding Christopher by the ear. For a moment she seemed to be trying to understand what she had just heard. “You knew about this?” she asked, in a strangely calm tone of voice, disbelieving.

“I did,” I said. “I’ve known about it all along.”

She shook her head as though it were a sieve and she was trying to sift some essence from this bit of information. “You … you’re saying you
knew
this boy was spending his nights lazing about with niggers, and you didn’t say anything to me?” she said.

“It was all I could do to keep from saying something myself,” said my brother.

“I think you should resist a bit longer, brother,” I said. I turned to Addy. “The boy’s been spending a few evenings by the river. Swimming. Fishing. I saw no reason to make a fuss. I didn’t want to worry you.”

“You didn’t want to worry me?” She adjusted her grip, cranking him up like a foul-hooked fish. “It didn’t occur to you …”

“It occurred to me,” I said, feeling myself growing angry. “I just didn’t do anything about it.”

She smiled. “Oh, I see. You didn’t think that maybe—”

“Why don’t you put the boy down,” I said.

She stared at me a moment, then laughed, incredulous. “What?”

“Let go of his ear.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

I could see her lip beginning to tremble. Her chin looked like a peach pit now. I didn’t care. I took a step forward, jerking my brother along.

“Oh, yes you will,” I said.

“I’m his mother …” she began.

“I’m not going to say it again,” I said quietly.

“Fine,” she said, almost whispering, fighting hard to keep her features from rearranging themselves against her will. “Fine. If you’re bound and determined to make a liar out of him, go ahead.” And letting go of Christopher’s ear (who sank down to the ground, crying less from
pain than from what was happening around him), she turned around and walked away, her sister behind her.

For a few seconds the only sounds in the world were their steps on the wood and the creak of the lamp, swinging on its handle. “Go to bed,” I called into the growing dark, trying hard to sound like I always did. Uncle Chang. Father. I reached down and lifted Christopher up by the arm. “Come on,” I said, “stand up now.” He wrapped his arms around me, crying as I hadn’t seen him cry in a long time, and buried his head in my chest. He’d grown so tall. I petted his head, feeling him shake against my ribs. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It was my fault as well.”

My brother sighed. “This is what comes—”

“Don’t say anything, brother,” I said. “Don’t say anything at all.” And he didn’t.

I felt sorry afterwards—something I’m good at. This was my wife, I told myself. The mother of my children. Someone who loved them as much as I did. I had never threatened her before; never raised a hand against her. That was changed now. Though we would both do our best to pretend otherwise in the weeks and months to come, something had been broken between us.

But it couldn’t have been helped. For an instant, as Christopher had turned in her grip, trying not to cry, his eyes had caught the lantern’s light. I knew it was nothing—just the wetness in his eyes; a matter of perspective, nothing more. But in that moment, so help me God, they had looked blind to me, and before I knew what was happening I was wading in to save him—this one child of mine who probably needed saving least—from the one person in the world he least needed saving from.

And yet here’s the thing. Though I knew all these things to be true, I also knew that given the same situation, I would do it again.

VI.

Unlike things, the primers say, cannot be summed: The smell of sour milk. The taste of whiskey. The screaming of children playing in the wind.

How do you sum a life? You don’t. You don’t even try. You leave it as it is: irreducible, ungraspable. A torrent of things, of days—unlike, often unlovely—cutting a channel through your heart. The faces of your children, still red from the womb. The ripeness of the nursery on still winter mornings. The hoarfrost in the parlor windows, shot through with small oval thumbprints. The garden, that one briefseason, burgeoning madly as though under a spell, bowing down with fruit. You don’t add these things. How could you?

And yet you try. You must. One possum, hissing sheepishly, hunched forever on the crossbeam of a porch. Wind. The shadows of small clouds hurrying across the fields. An open door at the back of a house—like a well-lit painting at the end of a long corridor. In it, two boys, already far off, are caught mid-leap, disappearing over the edge of the bank.

Loss, loss. How to hold against this steady seepage, this never-ending subtraction? Go ahead: Herd them together, make a pile of them—the perfect days, the hours of life, the moments of utter happiness, brought on by nothing more than the smell of tobacco and the warmth of your
coat on a cool night. A small joke, perhaps. Remember your son standing mid-calfin the stream that day, half-buried in orange butterflies. Add your daughter, watching him. Now recall the crawdad you noticed passing by his legs. You could see it there, below that air-clear current spreading and respreading itself between the banks, hurrying over and around the brown, furred rocks … And for just a moment, everything held. Everything was right. And then, in a puff of silt, it was gone.

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

You fool! What are these things you hoard, compared to their leaving? To your father, trying to smile while dying against a bamboo wall. To your lover—lost. To a baby toddling across a wooden floor while her nurse, a child herself, stares out the window and, lulled by the fire in the hearth behind her, dreams of boys …

VII.

Did I know he was teaching him to read those long summer afternoons he was gone? I did not. Am I sorry for it now? No, I am not. I am sorry for many things—that is not one of them.

Christopher did what he would do. He always had. And having decided, for some reason forever unknown to me, that he would teach a slave to read—a decision still astounding to me for its implicit anger, its utter disregard for the laws of the day—he proceeded to do just that. Perhaps he thought I knew. Or that I had given him tacit permission, somehow, by defending his nights by the river. I doubt it. I doubt he would have cared.

I still find myself wondering, at times, how long it took them. How many weeks and months of days, the two of them holed up in some deadfall with a view of the woods below, always alert for movement—
any
movement, for black or white were nearly equal threat to them now—Christopher pointing, saying, “Naw, it can’t be that, ’cause there’s an
e
at the end of it,” first scraping the words in the dirt with a stick, then unfolding newspaper pages smuggled out in his boots, smoothing them against his knee. I can see them snorting with laughter (“That ain’t
‘Kan’s-ass,’
you donkey. You just forget the other
a
. I don’t know why”), picking out the words together as the first few drops smack the dust, the blackberry leaves, pock the page itself …

I missed it all. All those years he worked in our house (for I brought him and his mother in from the fields the week after his father died), I had no idea he could read the books on our table. Even now I find it a bit disconcerting, just as someone speaking a foreign language for privacy might find it disconcerting to discover that the people he had assumed were ignorant of his meaning had in fact understood every word. Moses never let on, never gave himself away. And Christopher never told me. Until the day, nearly five years later, when I received a letter stamped with the circular seal of the Union Army and signed by one “Private Moses Bunker,” I had no idea.

I had excuses, distractions. That was the year—the last, before the world accelerated like a runaway cart—when the rains didn’t come. The ponds shrank, the lettuces bolted, the corn burned. The mud banks of the river widened, growing out of the sluggish flow, then cracked into brown continents. Already you could feel the changes stirring in the land, hear the first high wind. We had no idea of what was coming, of course, no way of knowing that for the rest of our lives a listing of the years that followed—1857, ’58, ’59, ’60—would bring to mind a child counting out the distance between the lightning and the thunder; and yet it seems to me now we must have known it, must have sensed it in our bones.

Day by day my brother grew more taciturn, more irritating. Morning after morning—or so it seemed—we’d sit sweating behind that damned table while he (a man born on a bamboo mat!) imbibed the Holy Spirit, battening like a tick at my expense. I found it difficult to talk to him now. Though nothing dramatic had happened (it was mostly a matter of silences: head shakings and pursed lips, glances averted in disgust or disapproval …) I could feel him growing away from me. Confused and resentful (the thought that
he
should be backing away from
me
, after all I had borne for him!), I quite naturally took every opportunity to puncture his sanctimoniousness, using whatever weapon came to hand.