Ours, p.13
Ours, page 13
• CHAPTER 7 •
Inside
[1]
In September 1858, a stranger entered Ours, and upon his entry the air cooled, deepening the early autumn chill. Saint and the twins believed they imagined the unexpected cold together. Saint rested on her porch, watching Naima and Selah pull carrots and rutabagas from the earth. Then a stillness as with the coming of evil and a sudden, small vortex spun between them in the yard, unwinding its yarn of wind thread by thread so that wisps of frost touched and disappeared across their cheeks. They felt the break in the weather but didn’t know what it meant. Saint stood, yawned, and made her way into town just a half mile west, over Creek’s Bridge, and right onto Tanager, the northernmost road, where no one noticed that ten degrees had been stolen from the early afternoon. The twins waited for her to return, embracing each other to keep warm.
Saint closed her eyes to see if she could better sense the occasion, and sure enough, south of town, someone had entered through a tear in the barrier. It would take a while for whoever entered to make it to the mainland, so she took her time, waving and smiling at neighbors while children raced and wrestled in the grass. It was the end of an overly long grasshopper season and the most playful of the youth stalked the brown leapers, falling to the ground giddy after having caught one of the hard insects. The children were in good spirits even after a nervous grasshopper spat its dark and sticky fluid onto their hands. They would let it go, watch it jump and glide elsewhere, only to hunt it down again.
Summer had been mild, and the approaching autumn introduced itself with the remaining heat the prior season hadn’t used. Saint ambled as she was wont to do. Her deep red dress with onyx buttons from clavicle to waist interrupted the pale landscape with its own fire. But the cold that began in her garden stayed with her. She wore her hair wrapped in a large black linen scarf and her locs peeked from the top of the tower, which bobbed as she walked. Trembling, she unraveled her hair and wrapped the linen around her shoulders as a makeshift shawl.
Ours had only one entrance from the south, the rest of the border blocked off by dense woods. Saint stood at the crossway where the first east-west road connected to the entrance path and patiently watched for a figure to emerge. She looked to the sky, then nodded as though receiving instructions from deep within herself. A few paces ahead, Saint drew a circle in the path’s dust, then drew another circle inside that one and one more in the center, the concentric circles so perfect they nearly hummed from the ground. She waited again in the commotion of the trees that lined the path and created a green and golden hall through which the unwelcome visitor would walk. Branches swayed in the breeze and the applause they fed to the wind grew endless.
Saint had every intention of being a wall. She stood stalwart, unfazed by the flies drawing arcs near her face and the boughs clapping for a stranger she wanted dead for disturbing her nap. A biting wind cut around her. She crossed her arms against the pleasure of the trees, but they kept cheering above her. When the shape of a horse appeared on the path, she sighed. When it became clear her visitor consisted of a rider and a cart holding numerous books and a large mound covered in a sheet, a small fire lit inside her. A horse she could handle. A man with a cart full of books and a sheet-covered surprise was out of the question.
Wheels cracked along the pebbles and dry grass as the horse slow-dragged the ragged cart behind it. The man didn’t tug on the rein so much as he snapped both it and the horse into motionlessness and hopped out, sweat-drenched, just short of where Saint stood. He smelled of smoke and urine.
The man approached Saint and smiled. She nodded and killed a fly between her palms and flicked the dead thing off to the side. The moment he stepped inside the concentric circles, one foot went ahead of him and the other stepped behind, then he turned on his heels and his eyes rolled to the back of his head before closing. He hit the ground soon after. Hours later, the man woke and realized he was no longer in front of the woman in red. Every landmark that he remembered seeing before entering town—a leant-over maple tree, three large bushes to the right and two smaller ones to the left—remained, but the path he took that led him to that woman with the brilliant dress and impenetrable countenance had disappeared, somehow, in the void of a flat plain.
Saint returned to her porch, sweat dripping down the sides of her face, the cold air brought in by the intruder no more. Selah and Naima looked up for a moment, then returned to gathering vegetables from the garden. Naima chewed on a stick as she worked. Selah hummed to herself.
When Saint began to snore, Naima asked Selah, “What you see?”
“A man with a horse and a cart full of books come up on the path. There was something big in the cart under a sheet, too. He had on awful clothes. They looked burnt up. He was very handsome, though, brown like the bottom of a pot.”
“How she get rid of him?”
“I don’t know.”
Naima frowned. “You was watching, wasn’t you?”
“Saint killed the fly I was using to look,” she said, bored with the conversation.
“She knew you was looking,” Naima said, and put the stick back in her mouth and returned to work.
Selah hummed a bit more of her song, then responded as though the song helped her to get the words right. “Saint always know the looking of folks.”
* * *
Saint never taught Selah how to look into things. The girl woke up one morning thinking she was flying over a river and her shock became panic when she couldn’t land. She screamed and Saint entered the girls’ room. Naima was lying down, wrapped in a sheet with her back turned to them.
“I’m flying but I don’t want to. I don’t want to,” Selah whimpered into Saint’s shoulder.
Saint saw that the girl’s eyes were glazed over as though baby-blue milk had been dripped into them. She covered the girl’s eyes with a hand and told Selah to lengthen her breathing. “Deep, deep breaths,” Saint said. “Just think about being in my arms.” She embraced the child and counted to ten. “Open your eyes.” When she opened her eyes, Selah saw the fabric of Saint’s dress and thought she was underwater, so kept on whimpering. It took seeing Saint’s face for her to realize she had returned to the bedroom. Saint kept an eye on the girl but had difficulties figuring out what exactly had happened. She watched, but Naima made that unnecessary.
One day, Selah saw herself from overhead on the porch. Naima looked up and noticed a spider sat in its web over Selah’s head. Naima grabbed the spider and flung it across the yard.
“Did you see me? See my hand?” Naima asked. Selah said yes and that now she saw grass. Naima screamed with glee and clapped. “You inside a spider.”
“I want to be back inside myself.”
“Do you feel like you got more legs?” Naima squirmed and waved her arms at her side.
“I want to be back. I do not want to be in a spider.”
“Can you make it move?”
Selah held her breath and squinted. “No. It doesn’t seem like it. Naima, I do not want to be in the spider anymore.”
“Do that thing Saint told you to do last time,” Naima said.
“I thought you were sleeping,” Selah said, staring blankly ahead. No matter where she turned her head, she only saw what the spider saw.
“I was playacting.”
“That’s sneaky, Naima.”
“Just do what she told you.”
“That’s sneaky and I do not like it,” Selah said, her voice trembling.
Naima embraced Selah and said, “I won’t do it no more, Selah. I won’t do it no more.” She meant it, but because Selah couldn’t see her sister’s face, she didn’t respond to what she would’ve recognized as sincerity. “Close your eyes. I’ll count to ten. You in my arms. Think about me.”
When her sight returned, Selah didn’t speak to Naima for days, and for days Naima refused to eat. It took Saint scolding Selah for Selah to finally speak to her sister and for Naima, hungry and thin as the horizon, to begin eating again.
[2]
The next day, the man with the horse and cart returned the same way he had come before. Naima felt him first, then Saint, then Selah. All three stopped what they were doing—Naima poking around an anthill, Saint making soup for supper, and Selah napping in a large, upholstered chair in the main room. All three faced the direction of Ours’s mainland. Saint heard too much gurgling coming from the pot and investigated her soup. Black feathers bubbled up from the bottom where once were no feathers at all. She blinked and they were gone. Selah yawned and smelled smoke, sweet as a cookie, escape from her mouth. Naima felt water drip from her ears and down the side of her face, but when she wiped away the wet, she saw that blood, not water, stained her fingers. The three met outside and shared their conditions. Saint noted that each of their senses were under attack. She ran back inside. The girls waited, Naima covering her sister’s mouth and Selah covering Naima’s ears, and when Saint returned carrying her staff and a pistol, the girls’ eyes widened with fear. She handed the pistol to Naima and said, “Anybody come this way, you do what you have to do.” Naima nodded. Saint rushed off toward the woods. Her companion was nowhere to be found.
[3]
In Ours, the man with the whistling horse and the creaking cart full of Bibles and a sheet-covered mystery rolled on up Third Street past Bank, with the tiny cemetery on the east, and then Freedom Street, where Franklin and Thylias lived in a squat house on the northeastern corner. Franklin always sat on his porch with a shotgun between his legs and Thylias always sat on the opposite end of the porch with a shotgun between her legs. Franklin had made a habit of keeping his gun close by, something that rubbed off on Thylias. He watched the man and, not recognizing him, began to massage the butt of his gun. Thylias, bun tight as ever on top of her head, placed her fingers lightly on her gun as if placing her hands on her knees.
Over the years in Ours, the two sat in rapt silence on the porch, or orbited each other in the small house like two moons in perfect accord. They hardly spoke to each other but were not dismissive, merely thinned out by what they had lived and wanting now only to delight in the peace once absent in their lives. When hunger gripped one, the other cooked. If one felt sore, the other would rub a minty salve where it hurt. They kept to themselves out of obligation to this peace. They didn’t fear their neighbors but were exhausted by a past that lacked privacy and were inspired, now, by selves they suddenly had time to get to learn. In the castle of their own company, they nurtured this newfound safety with parental fervor. Many thought them laughless, but together they laughed. Many thought them strange, and perhaps they were, lying on the floor of their house, looking up at the meeting of ceiling and wall against which night’s vague illumination portraited itself with branch and moonbeam. And though not lovers, they found in privacy a platonic romance their otherwise history had vowed but failed to destroy.
It made sense, then, that they embraced their shotguns at the same time when the horseback stranger rolled in. What became learned mimicry for Thylias was instinct for Franklin, for as the man with the cart came closer, he and Franklin met eyes for a moment, seaming between the two men a rift in time no bigger than a thumbnail. The past rushed up through Franklin as he recognized in that cart-driving man’s eyes a pair of eyes he had seen before on the plantation that Saint and her companion annihilated over the course of a few days.
Neither his so-called master’s eyes nor the eyes of one of the overseers came to his memory; rather Franklin saw the eyes of another boy, older, familiar to him though not a friend. Franklin was a boy again, and both Thylias and the cart-driving man fell to the wayside as the older boy from his past came into view.
The older boy had shown Franklin a wounded fox he had found hiding in a dirt hole half-covered by a log. It was pregnant at the time but missing one of its hind legs from the shin down. The older boy regularly fed the fox scraps of fat and organ meat meant for himself and brought it water in a tin bowl. The older boy told Franklin not to tell anyone and Franklin promised he wouldn’t.
The following Sunday, the older boy went to the fox without telling Franklin. Franklin headed to where the boys usually snuck off, making sure no one saw him. He found the older boy standing over the fox that had just given birth to four kits. The older boy took the kits up from the hole and kissed each one, placing them beside him. Franklin smiled but remained hidden and quiet behind a thicket. The older boy looked at the kits for a moment, shook his head, then slit the throats of each small animal with a peasant knife. After the boy killed the last kit, Franklin yelped as though he were next for the blade. The older boy turned to face him. His eyes were joyless and unoccupied. Franklin ran away and told his father what he had seen.
After a brief discussion, a few men, rallied by Franklin’s father, understood: this trip had been the older boy’s second that day to see the fox, which had died while giving birth. The older boy killed the kits as a merciful act. This is why he went alone: to keep Franklin from having to witness what had to be done.
The men agreed with the decision and tried to explain it to Franklin, but he heard nothing they said. During the rush back to the plantation, before their so-called master discovered their absence, the older boy, betrayed but redeemed by the other men, looked at Franklin for a good while before turning his gaze back toward their destination, right in time for one of the most respected men in the group to place his large hand on the older boy’s head. Franklin couldn’t hear what the man said to the older boy, but he did hear laughter.
The same look Franklin received from the older boy way back when now warped the cart-driving man’s eyes. The reeking horse and the Bibles masked nothing of the undecipherable but darkly tinted gaze. All Franklin knew was that this look required a shotgun to keep at bay. It had something to do with death, that it follows, that it lingers wherever it lands.
Thylias spoke first, “Where you heading?”
“I’se looking for God here,” the man said.
“Sir, you looking in the wrong place,” Thylias responded.
The softness of her voice encouraged the man, despite the shotguns, to jump off his horse, reach into his cart, and pull out two Bibles. Thylias tensed up. Franklin held his breath. The man approached the two on the porch and before Franklin could shoot, Thylias stuck her hand out toward him.
“I’se got the Word of God to share with the people. These words set a sick soul free. God’s Word the only word,” the man said, and extended both arms. The Bibles’ gold lettering threw back sunlight into his face. Instead of lowering the books, he squinted.
“I can’t read a word in there, I’m afraid,” Franklin said.
“I can but don’t want to. Move along,” Thylias said. Her fingers tickled the shotgun’s side.
“The Word of God is final,” the man said.
Without raising her voice, Thylias replied, “God watched my friends get whipped to the bone. Tarry no more.”
The man lowered the Bibles and placed them back into the cart with much care. He leapt onto his horse, gave the pair on the porch one last look, nodded, then moved along.
Franklin’s hand trembled over the shotgun handle. He hadn’t stopped looking at the man since he arrived and watched him and his horse and cart mosey down the road with a stricken look.
He thought he had forgotten it, the test of manhood, the trial to put manhood in him so that it may stop all resonance of anything else: cowardice, fear, betrayal, the “womanly ways” of gossip, as the men called it, though their own gossip had brought them there to the hole. His father hadn’t even led the pack of men that took young Franklin back to where the foxes were killed. His father allowed someone else’s father to do that.
The men dropped Franklin into a just-dug hole and tossed the tiny dead kits in one at a time after him, their small, stiff bodies landing at his bare feet. The men shouted into the mud-mouth that he shouldn’t fear the dead and egged him on to touch the lifeless bodies because “They won’t bite. Can’t bite. You never had nothing to be scared of.” They ignored his screams—high-pitched, a birdsong, which only angered the men and humiliated his father, for even then, in a test of manhood, his son decided to sing.
Perhaps, this same birdsong attracted the young men to him while he played alone in the field because no other children would play with him. He sang alone to himself quietly, a wooden horse in hand that he made hop along the dirt road unlike a real horse and more like a bird, and the boys wanted to end the song, end everything bird once and for all. They pummeled him. Punched him in the face. Kicked him in the arms. The other men watched, yes, even his father, and Franklin understood this as yet another test that he didn’t know the answers to.
The boys punched harder, kicked his legs, and teased him. He lay huddled into himself, crying. “Fight back, boy,” he heard his father shout. Then a gunshot rang out and the boys scattered. All but one, who lay beside Franklin. It was the older boy who had cared for the foxes, bleeding out from the mouth, looking straight at him. When the boy’s parents ran toward their dead son, the so-called master raised his gun at them. They stopped. The so-called master stepped over the dead boy and looked down at Franklin.
“You’re safe now, son,” his so-called master said, the man’s smile full of tobacco. “Let this be a lesson to you all about property. You don’t own nothing, so you don’t care about nothing. I takes good care of what’s mine. And I can break whatever belongs to me just as well. Keep your hands off what don’t belong to you.” The so-called master looked at the dead boy’s father. “I’m expecting a new one from you soon. This debt yours.”
Flies landed on the dead boy’s face. Franklin looked for his father, but he had already disappeared behind a heap of unshucked corn.
