God's Fool (6 page)

Taking a handkerchief out of my pocket I reached over and slipped it, as best I could, under Lewis’s face. We stood up. My hands were shaking so badly I had to make a show of dusting the dirt off my pants.

“Maybe so,” said Eng, nodding. We started walking toward Price. I could see Gideon straighten from where he’d been leaning against the shed. The slaves, I noticed, were still standing, like so many silhouettes, in the shadow between the sheds. Mason, the overseer, was nowhere to be seen.

“I’m glad you see it that way,” said Price uncertainly. “I’m sorry for it, but there it is.”

“There it is,” said Eng, extending his hand.

In all our life together my brother only beat me to a punch once, and this was not that time. A split second before his right landed on Price’s left cheekbone, its twin, my left, landed on his right. He fell like an ox. I kicked the gun, which he’d been holding high on the stock, off to the side, saw Gideon, out of the corner of my eye, stroll over to pick it up.

We fought as we always had, swinging from the outside, using our inner arms up close to grab or hold or block. Tougher men had fought us and lost. Price, however, was a problem. Scratching and slapping, he tried to claw his way free, then turned and fought like a woman, gouging at our eyes and throats, tearing at our hair, trying to drive a boot or knee between our legs. At one point, hearing my brother scream, I turned to see that Price, with a strange, mewling whine, had sunk his teeth like a dog into my brother’s shoulder. Forcing his head down to keep him from pulling away, I grabbed the spongy mess of his broken nose and he let go. A few seconds later, my brother’s fist took out the teeth that had bitten him.

It was while we were on the ground that I felt the sudden blow to the back of my head. The world grew silent, as though I were being submerged under water. Clawing my way back to the surface, unable to turn around, I fought on as best I could. A second blow never came.

I’m not sure we would have stopped had it not been for Gideon. Price hadn’t moved in a while when, as in a dream, I heard a voice saying, “That might do, gentlemen. All good things must end.”

A hand came down and grabbed me by the elbow. My brother and I staggered to our feet. I felt a strong arm around my waist. Mason, the overseer, was lying on the ground, a piece of stovewood by his side. Gideon’s face drifted briefly into view.

The porch tilted crazily, then righted itself. My brother, I realized, was holding me up from the other side. “Walk,” he said.

Lewis and Joah were lying where we’d left them.

“We can’t …” I began.

“We can,” said Gideon.

“No.”

“All right,” I heard him sigh. “Just get in the goddamn wagon. I’ll get him.”

It was Gideon who lifted Lewis into the back of the wagon that night with the help of one of the slaves: the same wagon we’d laid him down in twelve years earlier. And fully awake now, the blood and the salt stinging our eyes, we drove him home.

XIII.

I gave Moses a white-handled Barlow knife. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. He thanked me nicely enough—he and his mother were in the house by then—and put it away in his overalls pocket.

He would carry it until May of 1864, when it worked its way through a tear in his pocket and fell, unnoticed, into the corpse-fed grass of the old Chancellorsville battlefield. Finding it missing, he tried looking for it—a white-handled knife would be easy to spot—but found the huge, sweet-smelling field his company had slept on so thickly sown with the dead, the yellowing bones of their toes and their knuckles peeping from the grass, the circlets of their spines protruding from the dirt like half-buried bracelets or burrowing snakes (as though that thousand-acre field were the very coatroom of death), that he gave it up for lost. That afternoon his unit of Grant’s army entered the Wilderness.

XIV.

Like the silt that keeps a footprint where the water is slow, the world holds our shape for a time. For days after he died I kept seeing him walking back from the fields or disappearing between the drying sheds. Lewis, it seemed, had occupied more space than I’d known.

The world is full of omens. Reason blinds us all. The day before he died we had let the hogs into the corn on a still, lowering afternoon just as the sun, disappearing under a lid of clouds, turned the fields of broken stalks, the fence rails, the western walls of the sheds a strange, unearthly orange. The hogs went through the downed corn like fire—rooting, grunting, squealing. I’d seen it before, yet this time—perhaps because of that strange light—there was a madness in it, in the sight of pigs as big as men rooting out moles and mouse nests, crushing tortoises hidden in the stalks, snorting and snuffing through the broken shells … One of the sows grabbed a snake. We watched as she tossed it left and right to break its spine, the snake flailing in her mouth like a long black rope. And I knew—as mother claimed she knew, as the blacks said they knew—that something bad had wormed its way up into the visible world, and would make its presence known.

A week after we returned home, though I knew it would leave us short in the field, I brought Berry and Moses into the house. My brother
argued. We had already lost our best worker, he said. To lose two more was madness. I refused to give in. We argued on, just as we had twice as children, when, unable to walk away from one another, our anger fueled by our proximity, we had fought until we couldn’t move from sheer exhaustion and just lay side by side, sobbing, until we found the strength to stand and walk home.

“They’re not coming into my house,” my brother said.

“I know that,” I answered. “They’re coming into mine.”

Without our being aware of it, a train of events had been set in motion, though it would sometimes seem to me, in the years to come, that the train had actually departed the station on the day we were born, that it had been there all along, running on invisible rails over seabeds and continents, and that the events of those days had simply made it visible to us. It hardly mattered. Predestined or newly born, our fate came rushing out of our past and hurtled by, leaving us standing, like twin travelers on the prairie, watching the lantern in its final car disappear into the dark.

We had topped a rise, and begun the long descent to war.

PART TWO

I.

Muang Tai, or Siam to a
farang
like me, is a dream now. The brown Meklong, turgid and ripe. The sun. The particular rankness—the essence of childhood, and not unpleasant—of water and waste and things drowned in the roots. The palm-thatched houseboats, tied each to each along the banks. The warm smell of the bamboo mats; the seething of the rain. We swam in the river a thousand times, laughing at the old women who assured us that Akuna would drag us down by our skinny ankles to join the company of the dead he kept under the shelves of rock, their mouths forever open like fish and their eyes as white as clouds; when we were older we grew bolder still, diving under the fishing boats as they came upstream, swimming smooth and fast as eels. Our father told us not to, but we didn’t listen.

Muang Tai was fish on the drying racks and the sweet smooth flesh of the lamyai scooped with a fingertip from a hard brown shell. It was the familiar outline of the branches of the shoreline trees at dusk—a pig’s head on a stick, a laughing man with a broken arm, a sad man with twigs in his hair; it was a trunk along the river path, a wrinkled old boll like an elephant’s eye.

Muang Tai was the great, lumbering beetles we tied to strips of river grass and fought against each other in the dirt. They had great purple jaws like scimitars and we would play with them for hours, or so it
seemed, listening to the minute clicking of their jaws, moving them this way and that, lifting them up into the air like puppets whenever they seemed about to get a real hold. Though of the same tribe they hated each other instinctively (though it occurs to me now that it might have been as much their predicament as their nature that made them what they were), and we would fight them on and off for days sometimes, keeping them in crude cricket cages we made ourselves, feeding them bits of fish and fruit, until the day Eng’s beetle, a slightly smaller variety, closed its jaws on mine and neatly scissored off its long, whiplike antennae. Hardly an oversensitive child, I crushed it with a stick to allay its suffering, but the image of it blundering around, turning in small circles, stayed with me, and I never played the game again.

And then there was the sadness of the leaf cups, each with its little candle, sent down the river on Loy Krathong. And the heavy, head-shaking walk of the buffalo in the paddies. And the day my father saw a half-grown python looped like a small tree around something on the riverbank. When we threw sticks at it, it vomited up the small dog it had almost swallowed, and slipped, as though through a crack, into the water, a reticulated chain of velvety black and brown and yellow that gleamed a pure peacock blue where it passed through the sun. Left behind in the mud, covered in a smooth, unctuous cream, the dog looked like something that had been born too early, or had long ago drowned in milk. I did not feel sorry for it.

It’s been sixty-three years now since we stepped aboard the
Sachem
with hardly more than Mr. Melville’s carpetbag to our names. Nearly a lifetime. We received little news of our mother or our brother Nai: a letter a year, if that, less as the seasons passed. And just as the time came when the language of home grew wooden and strange in our mouths, when we had to work to remember the names of the most common things and finally gave up trying, so it was with those we had left behind. Year by year, as if by some chemic process inexorable as the rusting of steel or the greening of bronze, their touch, their anger, their familiar essence faded, until those we had known as intimately as we knew our own skin
had been reduced to little more than a name, an occasional sorrow, and a small collection of hardened memories, unrecognizable under the verdigris of the years.

We didn’t intend it that way. We would have had it otherwise. But the plantain-leaf boats we released on Loy Krathong went each their way. Some, pushed out too hard by their eager owners, or swamped by the waves from a fisherman’s boat, winked out early. Some, caught by an invisible loop of current, came back around. And some—a relative few, admittedly—just kept going, receding farther and farther into the dark, their tiny flames bobbing precariously on the black water until they had disappeared from view. And we from theirs, I suppose.

I would have stayed. As would Eng, though he would never admit it. But Hunter, behind his Scots reserve, was as ruthless as Barnum would ever be, and Coffin, despite his Presbyterian posturing, could hear the ring of bullion at ten miles. Hunter knew he’d spotted a goldmine the afternoon he saw us, as he put it, swimming in the Meklong River like some strange animal with two heads and four arms, and Coffin, having wheedled the affections of King Rama III, knew how to grease the path whether it wanted greasing or not. The king’s permission was secured. We were promised a salary and a chance to see the world. My mother, who would be losing not only her two oldest sons but their income as well, was offered three hundred pounds. She did not say no.

When I think of her now I see her as she was then, as though time had simply stopped in Meklong when we left it. And more and more, I find myself remembering not the person I once knew in life but the one I came to know in dreams. I’d seen her in my sleep, talked with her, scores of times over the years, but it wasn’t until after her death that I realized that those ghostly meetings—without the ballast of flesh and blood to balance them—had quietly taken over the territory of the past. Now, when I thought of her, I found it easier to recall the person I’d seen standing in the moonlight by the tobacco sheds in a dream than I did the distant figure crying on the pier in Bangkok in 1829 as the boat carrying her two boys and their pet python moved off into the harbor.

If someone had told us we would never see her again, we would not
have believed them. But then, how many of us, stopped by some Elijah on the pier when we were young, would have believed that our lives would take the turns they did?

When she was five or six, my Nannie began asking about her grandparents, as children will. She wanted to know about her grandmother in particular—what she looked like, whether she got mad at us when we were boys—and Eng and I did our best. We dusted off the old anecdotes, untangled their strings, made them jump about. We described the Grand Palace in Bangkok, with its blue-and-orange tiled ceilings and gold mosaic walls. We told the tale of King Trailok’s beloved boatman who, upon running his lord’s barge aground on one of the bars of the river, insisted, over his lord’s offers of leniency, on being put to death. We repeated again the threadbare tale of how our mother, a fishmonger’s wife, sent away the king’s physicians who wanted to separate us at birth, how this quietest of women, who often smiled but seldom spoke, had stood at the door of our houseboat, a stick she’d taken from the fire in one hand and the knife my father used for cleaning fish in the other, and told them to leave.

Nannie’s curiosity was limitless; not so my inventiveness. Strangely touched by her interest in a woman she had never met, aware as well of how much it would have meant to our mother to know that a daughter of ours would one day ask about her, I struggled on, filling in the chinks as necessary, tidying up the thatching, feeling all the while that my memory—our memory, for Eng remembered even less than I—had betrayed us all. This was not our mother. In the age-old battle between language and time, I thought to myself, neither wins. Time hurries off with its prizes; our words are all that’s left us.

But then something unexpected happened. As we continued to tell our tales over the course of those two weeks, the inadequacy of our words became less troubling, their failure to capture the truth less obvious. They came to seem, if not true, then good approximations of the truth, and so, our consciences partially salved, we sailed on; we offered them to the children who gathered in the parlor by the old double chair
every evening to listen—stories that had never really happened, about people who had never quite lived—and they, by some miracle of transubstantiation greater than all the breads and fishes, took the stories we told and fashioned them into something very much like truth. After listening for the twentieth time to the story of our mother and the king’s physicians—a story so much deeper, sadder, and more beautiful than I could ever begin to tell—Nannie turned to us one winter night as we chunked up the fire and said, simply, “Grandmother was very brave.” And there it was: a nugget of truth in the gravel of our tales.