Cy in Chains (6 page)

“No!” he tried to scream, his lungs filling with water.

Cy jolted awake, gasping for air, at first grateful but then disappointed to still be alive. The nightmare had haunted him now for more than three years, but it never grew less horrifying. Jess had promised him that prayer would make his bad dreams go away, and for a while, Cy had tried to pray. But prayer hadn't worked because the “God of love” that Jess kept preaching about simply didn't exist. Or if he did, he was busy with more important things than the bad dreams of one black boy. Perhaps he simply didn't give a damn about black people. The world surely didn't, and hadn't God made the world, according to what Jess said? Or perhaps the white men who had taken charge of that sorry world were simply too strong for God. Even worse, maybe they worked for him.

Cy was sick of trying to figure it out. One thing he did know, though: any God worth believing in would have killed Mr. Dathan Cain and his men a long time ago and done something to save the boys who were their slaves. Or at least saved Cy. The others could look out for themselves.

He was desperate for more sleep, but he fought to stay awake. The dream was too much to face again. It was no comfort that some of the other boys were tormented by nightmares, too. Mouse would sometimes shout and wake up clawing at an invisible enemy. At first, Cy had felt sorry for him. Now Mouse and his dreams were just trespassing on Cy's sleep. You had to have rest after twelve-hour days breaking rocks or shoveling heavy, wet clay. You needed a small place of peace where you didn't have to deal with the nasty food, the reek of the outhouse, the stink of other boys who almost never got a bath. From the constant battles over the most ordinary things—an extra piece of cornpone, a blanket not yet infested with lice. From the need always to be looking over your shoulder, always to be protecting what few things you tried to pretend were your own. Rufus had pulled a knife—stolen from the kitchen—on High Boy in a fight over a worn-out cap. When it was over, High Boy had a three-inch slash across his left cheek, Rufus got twenty lashes, and the cap had been torn into worthless pieces.

Even though the air was cold, Cy's forehead and armpits were wet. He was glad no one near him was awake. You couldn't risk anyone seeing you were afraid. If you did, you were in danger of the stronger guys messing with you. Cy was glad he was one of the biggest in the camp, and he had a reputation now. It hadn't always been that way. When he first came to the camp, the older boys had beaten him, taken his boots, and mocked him for weeks after Bull found him crying. A year ago, Bull had picked on Cy one time too many and ended up with a broken arm. Cain got rid of him. Where he sent Bull and others who could no longer work, no one knew for sure. Cy hadn't much minded the light whipping he received for hurting Bull. He'd gotten rid of an enemy and made himself a boy to fear. Since then, no one had found the guts to try anything with him.

In the colorless shadows of dawn, Cy made out the gray shapes of sleeping boys stretched out on either side. Rain rattled against the roof and dripped through the holes in the rotting shakes. An icy drop hit his forehead.

Shit! Did he have to be wet from rain as well as his own sweat?

Cy tried to move out from under the leak, but there was nowhere to go. He and nineteen other boys were chained side by side on one long platform with only thin straw ticks between them and the wooden slats. Like everything else in the camp, there wasn't enough of the platform for everyone, so the boys slept jammed against one another. On Cy's left, Jess was dead asleep; he was big as a steer, and he took up a lot of room. More than his share. You could poke him, and he wouldn't budge. It was like sleeping next to a boulder. Next to Jess, the new kid, Billy, lay like a corpse, except that his chest rose and fell underneath his blanket. On Cy's right, Mouse pressed close, craving warmth.

Cy couldn't stand Mouse nestling against him. Sure, he made a little heat even though he was the smallest boy in camp, and yes, Jess kept preaching that they had to take care of him. Cy didn't see it that way. It didn't matter if you were huge, like Jess, or puny, like Mouse. When you got down to it, you had to take care of
yourself
, because no one else would. If you didn't—or couldn't—you were done for.

The way Jess babied the little guys got on Cy's nerves. Last night, it was all about Billy. He'd been brought to the camp after dark and sent into the kitchen where Cy, Jess, and a couple of other boys from their bunkhouse were scrubbing the pots. Billy was jabbering with fear, the way all the new ones did. Rosalee, the cook, got him some cold beans and cornpone, but Billy wouldn't eat. He couldn't do a thing except stand there, trembling.

“I get him calmed down, Mr. Cain, sir,” Jess had said. “He be all right.”

Don't bother
, Cy thought.

“Do it, then,” Cain told Jess. “He can sleep next to you tonight.” He turned to Prescott. “Chain him. Sooner it's done, the better. Nigger looks like he's about to have a fit.”

Prescott moved toward Billy, who backed away and bumped into Jess.

“It be all right,” Jess assured him, his huge paw on the kid's shoulder. “He just got to chain you. It don't hurt.”

Prescott brought out a set of leg irons. “Come here, you.”

Billy didn't move.

“Go on,” Jess said.

Billy took one step—stopped.

“I ain't got all night,” Prescott growled.

“He too scared to move, sir.”

“His feelings ain't my problem! Come on. Move!”

Do it!
Cy yelled in his head.
Hangin' back ain't gonna get you nothin' but trouble. And, Jess, mind you own business. Let the boy find out for hisself what he got to look forward to. Sooner he understand how it is, the better
.

Jess nudged Billy toward the white man. Billy went, feet dragging across the wooden floor. Prescott squatted in front of him and snapped an iron ring on each ankle. A chain joined the two rings. Fixed to the middle was another piece of chain with a ring at the end. Billy would learn to tuck that into his belt so he wouldn't trip over it. But if he used his belt to try and hang himself, they'd take it away, and then he'd have to manage his chains as best he could. And he'd learn to shuffle. Playing tag, climbing a tree, walking somewhere in a hurry—no more of that stuff, not for a long time. Maybe never.

It all depended on how long Cain said you had to serve. Some of the boys claimed they'd been sentenced to a certain number of months or years by judges who'd tried them for stealing or other offenses. Other boys hadn't ever had a trial. Local sheriffs had picked them up as runaways or vagrants and delivered them to Cain without any kind of charges or formal hearing. Still others, like Cy, had been kidnapped. No trial, no sentence, no stated amount of time to serve.

In the three and a half years he'd been in Cain's camp, Cy had seen only a few boys leave. Some said if you were there more than five years, you wouldn't make it. No one could last more than five. By then, the boss men would have worked you to death, or starved you, or beaten the life out of you.

Prescott stood up, looking satisfied. “See, nigger? Nothin' to it.”

That's when Billy puked all over Prescott's boots.

“God
damn
it!” Prescott cried. “Stupid little son of a bitch!”

Cain and Stryker laughed.

Cy wanted to laugh too—he hated Prescott worse than anyone else in his world—but he didn't want to risk having his face slapped or getting a whipping. Cain didn't put up with any crap from his “boys.”

“What's so goddamn funny?” Prescott fumed.

“Stuff always happens to you, don't it?” Cain said dryly.

“What do you mean?”

“Seems like the world got it out for you, that's all.”

“He didn't mean to do it, sir,” Jess told Prescott.

“Shut up, you. My best boots! Damn it all to
hell
.”

“We clean 'em up for you, sir.”

Not me
, Cy thought.

“You mean
he's
gonna clean 'em up. I don't care if it takes him all night to do it, either.”

“Deal with it,” Cain told him. “I got no more time for this mess.”

Prescott ordered them to their bunkhouse, where he made Billy wash off his boots and polish them until they looked decent. The kid started crying in an annoying, whiny way once he began, and he didn't stop all the time he put on the black polish and buffed the boots with a rag. Cy felt like choking him, anything to make him shut up. Billy got quiet only when Prescott was satisfied and chained everyone for the night.

 

A raindrop hit Cy on the face, and then another. Damn! Couldn't the world leave him alone, for once? He wanted to pull the blanket over his face, but even doing that was difficult, what with Jess and Mouse lying so close by.

Somewhere down at the far end, in the gray gloom, cloth started to rustle. Someone playing with himself. All the boys who were old enough did it. Nobody minded, or at least nobody said anything. They all did whatever they could to feel good even for a few seconds, all without privacy. Everything without privacy. You pretended that no one saw you shitting in the five-hole outhouse or heard you crying for your mama in the night or playing with yourself when your body wouldn't give you any peace.

When he had first come to Cain's camp, Cy complained to Jess about having to do his business in the outhouse in front of other guys. “Pretend they ain't nobody there,” Jess had told him, and Cy had learned to do just that. It didn't always work, of course, but you had to try. Otherwise you'd go loony, chained at night to the others, chained during the long marches to the woods, swamps, and fields where you worked—every day like the ones that went before it and no different from the ones that would come after it. For Cy, it had been three and a half years of those kinds of days, close as he could figure. Sooner or later, he'd die or get sent to the coal mines in Alabama. He couldn't make up his mind which would be worse. Maybe there wasn't much difference between the two.

B
ANGA-BANGA-BANGA-BANG
!
T
HE SOUND OF
the wake-up gong shattered the silence. Cy knew he'd fallen asleep again, because daylight was filtering through the cracks in the doors. The rain had stopped, but he was still shivering. Another damn day, and still alive. He'd taken to hoping, halfheartedly, that he'd die in his sleep and be done with everything.

Mouse roused just enough to pull up his knees and burrow farther under his thin blanket. Cold weather hurt him because there wasn't a pinch of fat on him. His feet suffered the worst. When they touched Cy at night, they felt like fish pulled from a pond in January. The kid was no bigger than a child—
no bigger than Travis—
although Mouse swore he was thirteen. His arms and legs were little more than bones, and his voice hadn't begun to get deep. One night, Cy caught him sucking on his fist, just like a pup at its mama's tit, sound asleep.

Cy didn't move. Nobody did. Cain didn't mean that first call. He complained that his boys were too lazy to get up when the gong sounded, and he'd have to get real tough on them one day soon unless they changed their ways. Cain hired out the boys in his camp to anyone who needed their labor. He made his money that way. It wasn't much, to hear Cain talk. He was always moaning how he was going broke running the camp when he could do much better up in Atlanta.

Cy closed his eyes again, and his mind went straight to where he didn't want it to go: visiting day. A visiting day was scheduled every three months, but it was a bad joke: nobody ever showed up. Many of the boys didn't have any family they remembered or wanted to remember. If they did have families, maybe their folks stayed too far away to make the trip or were glad to be rid of another mouth to feed. Maybe they just didn't care.

An image of Pete Williams, sweaty in work shirt and overalls, sloppy from too much moonshine, flashed into Cy's mind and stirred up the black hatred in his gut. Pete Williams had never come for his son. That was too much to forgive.

He dozed again. The second gong sounded. Now it
was
time to move. Jess opened his eyes, stretched, and said, like he always did, “Good day, gentlemen.”

Cy poked Mouse. “Come on. We gotta go.”

Mouse curled up even tighter.

Down the row, boys came awake. Groans, complaints, sounds of “Move it!” and “Wake up!” and “Lemme alone!”—all the usual morning noise.

“Mouse!” Cy shook him. “It time.”

“Unnhh.”

“
Now
. They gonna unlock us any minute.”

Sure enough, from outside came the sound of Prescott opening the lock. At night, the chains with the ring at the end, the ones attached to the chain between the boys' ankles, were put down by their feet. Then Prescott and Stryker took another chain and passed it through the rings. This chain was pulled through a small hole in the far wall of the bunkhouse and attached to a post outside. After all the boys were secured, one of the white men fed the chain through a similar hole in the wall by the door and fastened it around another post. Any boy trying to escape would first have had to unlock the chain outside—but that was impossible. Cy sometimes worried what would happen should there be a fire at night. He and the others would be trapped unless someone from outside rescued them.

“Time to wake up, Billy,” Jess said. “We got to get ready.”

Billy opened his eyes, and Cy could tell he didn't know where he was. Then he remembered—and started to twitch.

Not another boy prone to fits, Cy hoped. They didn't need that mess.

“Hey, now.” Jess put a gentle hand on Billy's chest. “No need for that. Jus' do what I do, and you be all right.”

You be all right.
Only Jess could make such a lie sound so true.