When I Crossed No-Bob (7 page)

I run into the flames and smoke and right there, in the back of the schoolhouse, there lies Jess Still, looking like he's fast asleep.

He looks smaller than small and his right hand is closed around the asafetida he wears round his neck. He doesn't feel heavy when I pick him up and put him over my shoulder. The smoke and fire make me mad and my mad makes me strong.

I get out of there fast, and when I fall down to the ground with Jess Still I am coughing and spitting. Early Rise comes and hugs her boy but he does not wake. Someone pours water on him but he does not wake. Early Rise is wailing. She cannot get her little boy Jess Still to wake up.

I am too late. I was too late. He is gone. Jess is gone. Not from the fire, but from breathing in all that smoke. I kneel down there with all of them wailing. I hold on to the asafetida bag, the one he gave me.

Little Bit pulls me away. Little Bit, streaked now with dirt and tears. We run run run back home to Mr. Frank's. When we get there they are both either too angry or too shocked to start
yelling at us for coming home so late. Little Bit tells her brother to go go go to the colored church and help them. We can't explain. There are no words. They smell the smoke on us. We say yes, fire, fire.

Mr. Frank goes and Miss Irene stays and lights a fire for heat.

Little Bit and me, we get out and unfold our map. It is on a big sheet of paper, the kind Miss Irene uses to wrap things in. Little Bit and me, we both know what to do. We set out to draw. We do it together, side by side, not her at one end and me at the other, because we want to make sure we get all the little things right. We mark the trails we used more carefully. We draw trees we remember more clearly. We label them too, because when you chart it all out at the end of the day, it's important to see everything from far off and up close too. Most people miss the up-close, little things.

We sit together side by side and draw what we've just seen.

It seems so important. We are both in a hurry because we both know. We both have to remember this so that we can forget.

We draw and draw. We draw the map and with it we draw the story. And not once do we stop. We draw the schoolhouse and the fire. We draw all the hooded men. We draw the cross.
We draw the man with the special hood lighting the match. Little Bit marks it with the date.

We fold up the map. We put it in a jar that had the good peaches. Then we go outside, dig a hole under Mr. Frank's praying log, put it there in the ground, cover it back up with dirt, then roll the log over it.

Buried. Not our treasure, our nightmare.

I keep thinking about the colored graveyard down the road. There were no markings for the graves, or if there ever had been, they are long gone. I never made a headstone before. I sit outside on a log with Little Bit and her brother Jack. We are here with all the rest who come to mourn Jess Still. I think about what a headstone should say about this little boy.

Jess Still Rise, named on account of his standing still all the time, even though we three did all that running in the woods. When I met him that first time, when he and his pappy drove
the wagon to Mr. Frank's house, I wished I'd been him. He had a pappy to ride with.

He was the only person who ever called me Adeline.

"What else did you know about Jess?" I whisper to Little Bit. We are all supposed to be quiet now, thinking and praying. Jess Still lays in a pine box in front of us. They made his coffin at home and blackened it with soot. We have services outside because the schoolhouse was this town's one building and it is now burned to the ground.

Little Bit thinks some. "When he was littler, he used to leave out the
g
's on all his
-ing
words."

I am both glad and sad to know this about my friend.

The black folks sing and it is slow and sad, the pitifullest and mournfullest song I ever heard. Mr. Frank and his parents, Miss Irene, Little Bit, Jack, and me are the only white folks here. Mr. Frank's ma and pa brought Early Rise a ham. They said they didn't know what else to do—they felt so terrible bad for Early Rise and her husband, Sunny. They said they know what it is to lose a son.

The preacher is the preacher from that night, a black man who speaks in a calm, quiet way. No shouting, ranting or raving, or speaking in tongues the way I seen some preachers do. He just speaks to us, like he is talking to me personal and from
his heart. Like he's talking to his brother or his sister, his son or his daughter, like he cares.

I look at each of the people as they come up to say goodbye to Jess Still. There is a former slave woman named Please Cook with her son, Deuteronomy. She puts a kerchief inside Jess's open coffin. A man named John Calhoun steps up, kneels down on one knee, and stays with Jess for some time.

Little Bit whispers to me about Mr. Calhoun. Before the war was over, his mistress agreed to grant Mr. Calhoun freedom for one thousand dollars. Mr. Calhoun worked after he'd finish his day's work. He was good with his hands and made walking sticks and split rails by moonlight. On days off he made cabinets and sold them to the white people. He saved nine hundred dollars and gave it to his owner, but before he could make an additional one hundred dollars, the slaves were freed. Without asking, Mr. Calhoun's mistress gave him a deed to forty acres of land, because, she said, that's what he had paid for. I suppose she thought she was doing right by Mr. Calhoun, but what if he didn't want the land at all? What if he just wanted to leave?

Mr. Calhoun stands and places a little hand-carved wooden ark in Jess's right hand.

I recognize some from the schoolhouse, others I don't.
There is the black man without a hand. Heard tell he was trying to read and write and his master cut his hand off. He's carrying a Bible with his one hand and he reaches in and leaves that book with Jess. They all have something to give Jess, for where he's going in that sweet afterlife, there's no telling what he'll need.

Then the people sing "Been Toilin' at the Hill So Long" while Jess's momma lays a new asafetida bag in Jess's left hand.

I'm so sad I can't cry.

It is like I see them all for the first time and my heart is heavy, heavy with hurt and worry for what I seen, what I see now, and what I know. This feeling I have is bigger than the sad feeling I have had for Momma and Pappy. I grieve so much that my heart feels heavy in my breast.

"Are you for religion?"

"Well, sure I am, Addy," Little Bit whispers.

"Is there a heaven for colored people?"

"I suppose there is."

"What's it look like?"

"Can't rightly tell. Never been to any of the heavens. And I'm in no hurry neither."

"Y'all need to hush," little Jack says.

The O'Donnells, we don't bury our dead on public
ground. We bury our dead on our own farms. The land is tilled over our graves.

Little Bit and I get to talking about ghosts. I say Jesus came back and spoke to his friends, the Apostles, after he died. Didn't that make him a ghost? Little Bit says it makes him a holy ghost.

"Do you hear them talking during prayers?" little Jack says to his ma, trying to get me and Little Bit in trouble.

The night of the fire, after I put Jess Still before her, Early Rise took her son and had him stretched out just like you see Mary done with Jesus Christ when they took him down off the cross. And they all sat down by his body on the ground and cried cried cried like Mary and them done. That's the way Little Bit and me left them that night. That's the way I'll always remember them.

The grave of Jess Still is not mine to mark. That is for his family. Even this makes me sad. Why must we all claim somebody, dead or alive? When a body dies, is it free or does it belong to God? When is a body free? How do we
be
free? Do we all need to be taught to be free?

Almost every family loses a baby here in these parts. But not like this. Babies aren't murdered. Nobody knows what to say. Are there any words for comfort?

After we put Jess Still in that sorry red ground, Mr. Frank, Miss Irene, and I head home in the wagon. Little Bit and Jack go home with Mr. Frank's pa and ma.

I think maybe they don't want me around Little Bit anymore. I think maybe they think she's seen too much on account of me. And I feel sorrowful bad about that, but I also want to say she's her own person. She is just now teaching herself to be free.

After we eat, none of us saying much, I go out near the barn to sit on Mr. Frank's praying log, but Mr. Frank is already there. He's reading his Bible, trying to find some story to keep his mood company.

Mr. Frank, he scoots over and doesn't say anything when I sit down. The log sinks a little with my weight.

"I'm sorry that you and Little Bit saw that little boy Jess die in that fire," he says. "I spoke with the sheriff. They're going to look for the men who did this."

When Mr. Frank came back from the fire that night, Little Bit and me, we told him all that we knew. Later, after Little Bit fell to sleep, I went outside, dug up the peach jar, unfolded the map, and stared and stared and stared at that man lighting the
match that lit the cross that fell on the schoolhouse that killed Jess Still. Then I folded the map back up and put it in the jar and into the hole under the log.

"Do you think they'll ever find the men that did it?"

"Hard to say," Mr. Frank says, sighing. He looks tired and pale. "Sheriff says there have been a lot of bad nights. A lot of violence mostly aimed at the freed slaves."

"You're not joining up with them Ku Kluxers, are you, Mr. Frank?"

"Course not, Addy. And you don't need to worry about these things."

"If I don't, who will?"

"You did a fine thing, going in after Jess. A fine and right thing."

"It didn't do no good."

"I guess you know now it is just as easy to do good as it is to do bad," he says.

I think of all those hooded men laughing. I think of all those men walking away from that fire, not catching any heat, no blame.

"No, it ain't," I finally say. "Doing good is harder. Doing nothing is the easiest of all."

Mr. Frank stays quiet and then nods. "You're right, Addy."

I bite my bottom lip. Even if I was right every day of my life, no one never ever, no one ever, told me so. It is hard
not
to smile and hug him, but we both, we just sit there a while longer on that log under which lay our buried map.

It is a school day the next day and we rise early like we have every day and Mr. Frank and I set out, same as we ever do, except that today we turn off and head toward the other schoolhouse. The burned-down schoolhouse.

When we get there, there's nothing left but a pile of burned-up mess.

Mr. Frank and me, we are not surprised or even awestruck by the destruction. We take it in like sleepwalkers and poke around some.

I look for the place where Jess Still had lain still. There is nothing on the ground to say that something terrible happened here. No blood, no bones, no markers or tombstones. Just this bad smell of burning.

There is not much left to do. There is not much more we can do.

I find a wood shingle that is not so burned from the fire and make the surface smooth. I think of what to cut on it with
my pocketknife. How does a body ever know a person? I think on Jess Still and what I hear about him. Then I carve out and write what I do know.

I don't need Mr. Frank to assign me a theme. I write what needs to be said. Mr. Frank stands by me and he reads:

J
ESS
S
TILL
R
ISE
M
URDERED AND
K
ILLED
H
ERE
N
OVEMBER
17, 1875

I bury that marker deep into the ground.

Monday is washing day. I build a fire and carry water from the spring. I set the wash pot on the fire and dump all the clothes in, stirring in Mr. Frank's overalls and long-legged underwear with the troubling stick. I get the washboard and a cake of soap ready when Miss Irene comes outside and says for me to go on with Mr. Frank.

I am so glad, for I would much rather build a schoolhouse than wash clothes.

***

Most all of us schoolchildren come out to rebuild the schoolhouse with Mr. Frank. Most every able-bodied black man, and even a few white men, come to help build. Rew Smith and his pappy stay away.

Even the sheriff comes and starts the day with a little speech about how he and his men are trying to track down who did this and how it's important to let the law take care of things. Then we all pray some.

We have to haul lumber from a distance because the Yankees took out the sawmills.

Mostly we children haul lumber and help with the food for the men who are building. Some of the men are cutting the pine logs, peeling the bark, shaping them with a broadax, cutting V-shaped notches in both ends to make them ready to fasten together with wooden pegs. Early Rise and Mr. Frank's ma are in charge of the noontime meal. They have a wash pot over an open fire and they are sorting through all the foods women, black and white, bring in.

When we're all working together this way, the work goes fast.

Layer by layer, the log walls are rolled up and into place, notched and fitted at the corners. Mr. Frank cuts two stout
young trees down entire and sets them up at both end walls, their branches trimmed into a crotch to support the ridgepole.

Near about lunchtime, Please Cook's son, Deuteronomy, blows an old cow horn.

We eat corn pone, greens, and turkey and dumplings. There are roasting ears, beans, and applesauce. It is still a bad time for folks. Money and goods is hard to come by, but there is game in the woods and here we all are eating up, all because we come together.

By the end of the first day, the chimney built out of mud and rocks is up. Deuteronomy calls it a "chimley."

Mr. Frank and the other men agree that this schoolhouse will have a wooden floor, not an earthen floor, and I volunteer to help haul off split logs for planks.