Wash (21 page)

Cleo nods.

A few lights come on through the dark. Both of them can hear a horse galloping down the long drive.

Rufus draws her hand into his lap.

Cleo waits.

“Where I’m gonna go they can’t find me? Everybody know me. How far I’m gonna get, running and tripping and falling all the way? Dogs’ll catch me by tomorrow sundown.”

Rufus looks at their bare feet side by side in the dirt.

“Can’t see just how it will go, but I don’t want it like that.”

They sit together. After a while, Rufus stands up slow as an old man, still holding her hand, drawing her with him down toward the old dock that’s overgrown and forgotten by now. Behind the low wooden wall gone silvery, with the lake water lapping underneath.

It isn’t until early that next morning that they come back. What almost saves Cleo is the way she comes walking up from the old dock, hand in hand with Rufus and love hanging off of her like moss in the trees. Nobody can believe, in the face of everything that’s about to happen to her, that a woman would be trying to find her some sugar.

Once they reach the quarters, Cleo looks quietly into Sissy’s face until the older woman stops yelling. Then she opens her fingers. Rufus’s warm palm slips from between them and Cleo feels the cool morning air take its place. She turns away from both of them and heads to the house to see if she can make herself the only casualty.

Sixteen people are sold that day. There is no telling anybody the facts. Eli wants the entire kitchen and hospital staff off the place immediately. Sold before word gets out. That is how his grandfather always said to handle it and he knew about poisonings. They do not beat Cleo because they want as much money for her as they can get and because Eli does not trust himself not to kill her.

Besides, he says, no one died. Just a whole lot of cramping, throwing up and bloody diarrhea. Once things calm down, Eli decides it makes a good story. He tells it for years.

∞

Wash

Soon as those Thompson boys found out I couldn’t see straight, they put me in the field. Like they’d been waiting on the chance. Said they wanted me at the far end of the last row. Told that damn Pickens to run me into the ground.

They were caught between wanting to whip me trying to make me do right and not wanting to send me home torn up. I’d a thought the feel of that hammer coming down and sinking hard into the side of my head woulda lasted em a while but I guess not.

I heard em figuring how they’d tell Richardson about my scar. They decided they’d tell him that boom swung round and nailed me before I saw it coming. Even though they’d been yelling at me, I hadn’t looked in time. They’d tell him I was plenty strong but not too good at listening.

Once they had their story straight, they told Pickens to watch for leaving any more marks on me, but said he had some leeway seeing as I was so dark. Said he’d have to whack me pretty good to make it show. That’s like trying to find your way on a moonless night is what they said.

And Pickens sure did like to mess with me. He knew the hardest thing was for me to see other folks knocked round and can’t do nothing about it. At first, I spent my time trying to watch where he was headed and then trying to get there first. The bigger boys were on their own but I didn’t like seeing the mammas falling in the dirt. I stayed so busy trying to stop his hand from coming down, or else trying to make it come down on me instead, it’s a wonder I got any cotton in my sack at all.

Pickens got so he’d do it just past my reach. All I could do was make sure he saw me looking at him good. Then he got so he’d be sure to do it just on account of my watching. I was bringing him down harder on us and everybody started cussing me. Said put your damn nose in your cotton sack and keep it there.

It took me a while to learn not to look. That was where I tripped and fell over my growing up. That right there was where old man Thompson was wrong to leave me to myself for so long. Out on that island, full of storms and roughnecks, folks could see folks. Not all the time, but more times than just a few. Storm coming and you need some help battening down your house, they helped you. Somebody got a gun, you get out the way, no matter who it is or isn’t.

It didn’t matter that my mamma was somebody’s negro. When those chickenlegged wild boys from up island heard the old man died and came snooping through the woods to mess with us, she stood on that porch with his gun pointed right at em and she was ready to use it. They backed off sure as you know it.

This place was a new world and old habits die hard. But I finally learned to mind my own business. Pickens couldn’t whip me but that didn’t mean he couldn’t knock me round good then stake me out in the hot sun by the canal where the marsh grew thick and the mosquitoes covered you like a blanket. So I let it go piece by piece, my picture I’d put together out there on that island about how the world worked and how people are. Only some people, I started telling myself. Only some people.

Rufus had kept me out of trouble until that hammer. After that, I was in the field but good. I tried fighting and I tried running, but everything I tried came right back round on my mamma. At first, those boys did it real direct. Made sure I knew each day I ran off and stayed gone in the swamp was one more day my mamma didn’t get her rations.

But I knew they wouldn’t take it all the way since they needed her to make those christening dresses to sell. My mamma knew it too. She sat there, wadding that pale cotton, shaking it in her fist at me, saying go!

At first, she tried to hold me back. She worried for me out in the woods but with the way things were going, she saw I’d likely be safer there. She didn’t think they’d kill me just to get me home. She hoped they’d leave me alone. Glad to be rid of me.

Folks did that a lot. Ran up in the woods and stayed for three or four days. They weren’t going nowhere. Just needed a break. Trying to clear their head before they did something stupid. All she wanted was a way to get word to me when time came for us to leave.

I made my way pretty far up in the swamp on the far side of the lake. Slipped out and back as often as I could. Then I started staying longer and longer. Weeks at a time and it burned those boys up. I stayed careful but there was folks tucked everywhere. Even in deserted looking places. People all round and somebody always ready to make that dollar.

Those times when I was on the place, I’d go by the shop sometimes after leaving the fields. Take Rufus some toddy. He practically lived there now Cleo was gone.

When I wanted some quiet, I’d go sit with him. It stayed close and hot inside but it felt good to me. I’d pick up a rag so gritty with soot and scale, it was heavy in my hand. Just holding that dirty rag made me bite down with missing working in his shop.

I’d sit there for a long time, sipping and looking round the walls lined with hooks full of jobs done. Running my eyes across all the brands for horses and cattle hanging on the wall. Then Rufus has one of em in his hand. A real small one and he’s digging in the dirt floor with the tip of the staff. He’s bent forward so the letter on the other end waves near his shoulder, up by his ear, and I’m laughing a little.

“You’d think they’d get sick of seeing their own damn name everywhere.”

“They stay so blind. Can’t see a thing if it don’t have that name written on it.”

“What’s the one you got? Lemme see.”

Rufus holds the smallest brand by the middle of its short staff. He twirls it end over end from his shoulder till the letter points straight down, hovering over the dirt floor. But I still can’t see it. He leans forward, lowering the letter real careful and slow, laying it onto a smooth soft spot in the dirt floor where it’ll take, then grinding it some before he lifts it. I’m looking at the pattern in the dirt but I don’t recognize it.

“What’s that one?”

“That’s a R for runaway. I was working on it that day I put you out. Sent you over to Pompey, but you had to show off how you know best. Trying to be a big man. All you got was knocked in the head. Coulda killed you myself.”

It was more than I’d ever heard Rufus say at one time. And I’m quiet, remembering driving my mamma crazy with my Rufus says this and Rufus says that. And I remember getting stronger and taller. The feel of the morning sun on me that day when I told those Thompson boys what I thought. That hammer coming right out of that bright blue sky down on the side of my head. The long darkness after that and then being sent to the field.

All of it felt like it happened to somebody else. Like that old me was somebody else. Different from who I was now. Rufus felt me drifting and he pulled me back to him.

“You left me. You up and left me with that squirrelly fool Cicero. Can’t shut his mouth to save his life.”

I’m shaking my head, smiling. I can see Cicero down here in this shop, standing on Rufus’s last nerve.

“Bet you keeping your mouth shut for the both of you.”

“Mmm hmmm.”

Seemed funny to me. Rufus and me sitting there talking like two men, when it wasn’t too long ago I was a boy and only way I could see Rufus was looking up at him.

“What’s the rush, little man? They make a man outta you soon enough. Few good whippings, they knock the boy right from you, am I wrong?”

I’m shaking my head no.

“I’d a made you a man but you didn’t have time to give me the chance, did you?”

And I’m shaking my head, no, I guess I didn’t.

“You got too busy.”

“Mmm hmmm.”

“And look at you. You a man now and all you got is time.”

“Pretty much. That’s pretty much it.”

We sat there, drinking and watching the candlelight falling across those Rs Rufus kept making all over the floor at our feet.

“Now you hearing me, hear this.”

I lifted my eyes to look in his face.

“If that day ever comes when I need to lay this R on you, you best know this my name I’m laying on you. You belong to me and always will. Even when you too hardheaded to see it. You mine. You hear me?”

“Yessir.”

We sat together for another long while after our drink was gone. Then Rufus stood up and I followed. He knocked the brand lightly against the workbench to get the dust off, then twirled it back end over end so he could hang it with the rest. Took the candle and opened the door, nodding for me to go ahead.

Once we both stood outside, he turned to lock the shop up, asking me over his shoulder, when we going fishing? I headed off my way, calling back to him, Sunday evening. And he headed off his way, saying see you then.

That hammer set me back some but I was still too big for my britches. Still starting mess and hearing my mamma less and less. Pretty soon, she stopped jerking me back from life and started getting that faraway look more and more. Seemed like I heard Rufus better for awhile, but I started losing him too. It wasn’t his drinking, it was what he was trying to tell me.

Used to be, Rufus calling me down was the only thing could make me do right. Used to be, Rufus saw straight inside me and the things he told me about the world made sense. But the more beat up I got, the more grown I thought I was, and the less I heard him.

I kept running into the swamp and started staying longer. Making sure Pickens knew I wasn’t going to let him jerk me round. I’d come back and get more work done in one week than most did in two, so they put up with me. But even then, seemed like trouble kept coming right for me. Like I was calling it. Like it was saying to me, you will not leave me.

Rufus kept telling me, play dead whenever those boys try to mess with you. Play dead, like a piece of hide those dogs fight over, and sooner or later they’ll leave you alone. He tried telling me it was my thrashing and jerking, trying to get away, that brought out the mean in em, but I wasn’t having none of it. Big tall Rufus telling me play dead like a possum. Telling me bend down when I ain’t never seen him bend down. Didn’t seem right.

He kept trying to tell me how life don’t work how I think it do. And the very first thing I need to let go of is how things oughtta happen instead of how they do happen. Told me I was hogtying my own self, but I wasn’t having it. One day, I looked into his face and told him, I’m getting tired of hearing you tell me what you need to do is.

That was the day when he saw I wasn’t hearing him no more. And that was the day he got through with me. He folded right back inside himself, nodding at me to say all right, you go head on then.

After that, I felt him loosing his grip on me and all of us. He drank more and more but he never got sloppy. He just got gone. I went down there to sit with him every now and then but he sat stiller and stiller. Didn’t make his own pieces in the evenings anymore. Told those saltwater negroes to go back to wherever they came from. Said he didn’t have nothing for em.

He got so he’d talk when he never did talk much before. Used to be, he’d hold it all inside his head. Used to be, Rufus was like he had a whole world inside him, stocked with whatever he needed and enough to go round for everybody. But once he started to go downhill, all that started to change.

Now that I look, I can see there were signs. But back then, I wasn’t reading em. Not yet. Just seemed to me like one day, Rufus stopped living in his mind like it was a place. He started talking out of nowhere, telling me every thought he had, like telling it was the only way he knew how to make it real.