She listened for twenty seconds, let out a soft cry as she sank down trembling on the side of the creaky bed, turned her face to Tom.
He raised his head, blinking to get the sleep out of his eyes, and stared at Eden.
"Is it about Bertie?" he asked.
"She's awake and alert. Still on the ventilator but doing, they s-said, miraculously well."
His face relaxed into an expression of gratitude and then irony at the echo of the word
miraculous
somewhere in his mind.
"All right, then. That's my girl. She's begun to heal herself."
"C-can she do that?" Eden blubbered.
"In many instances. Will you please get under the covers? You're shaking to pieces."
She had never felt more naked than in this decrepit room, four stained walls, a loose window that let in a whistling wind, a bed, the man she had made love to in the shower, soapy and voracious, then again minutes later in the bed. He was now looking at her with unexpected composure when she'd dreaded that he would push her away from him like a cheap pickup he already was tired of, regretted. She was embarrassed by her own body and bones, the sore on her lower lip, the still unbanked fire in loins and breast, not because he'd done badly by her but because each orgasm she'd experienced had seemed only a promise of greater bliss to come.
"It's all right, Eden," he said, sympathetic to the rage of emotions in her face.
"Oh, no, how can it be all right?! I went haywire; betrayed Bertie, my
God
, insulted us both, not to mention the memory of my—"
He reached up impatiently with both hands and pulled her down hard on top of him, Eden gasping in surprise, the rough stuff a new slant on the man and the situation. But his hands relaxed immediately while still keeping her close.
"We were both haywire, as you put it, for a time, and with damned good reason. I didn't know if you were alive or dead. Drove aimlessly, one road after another. How did you manage to get so far so quickly? No, it doesn't matter. The look on your dirty face when I found you. I had to make love to you quickly; I and nothing short of a bullet in my own heart could have stopped me. Quite the typical aftermath of a successful hunt. That's one aspect of it. But we made love to bring ourselves back to life. Now we will deal with it. Nothing has happened for us to be ashamed of, or grieve over, or waste time in recriminations."
"How can I d-deal with being in love with you?"
"But you're not, Eden."
He held her face against his chest while she shuddered in protest; then, to her chagrin and panic, he began to laugh.
"Nothing's funny! And how do you know what I—"
"Affection, gratitude, youthful desire is what you feel. Everything that we hope may define and enrich our long-term friendship."
"We haven't had the chance to—"
"I have no misgivings about making love to you, Eden. We've behaved humanly, not badly. But—"
Eden thought she saw herself, vaguely, a diminished spirit in the high gloss of the pupils of his eyes. She was very still against his body, afraid of what he must say next. Obeying the wants of the flesh had broken something that might not be repairable—a valuable charm that had bound the three of them in a magical circle.
"—But I would feel cheesy should I use this night as an excuse for an affair that would be good for neither of us. Tonight may have been fated; now we must try and get on with what is most important in our lives. Think about what lies ahead of you, Eden. And for Bertie and myself. You've grown in your powers, awesomely so, but only half of Mordaunt and what he represents lies buried behind us. You are still missing someone of vital importance to your evolution as the Avatar. Cry now if you must, but let that be an end to it."
After half a minute the motionless Eden said, "I won't cry?'
"Not yet. But you will."
"I think that I have to... go away for a while. By myself."
"Of course."
"I don't know what I'm going to say to Bertie."
"Shouldn't that be up to me?"
"Damn, damn,
damn
."
"But she will get over it."
"So sure of yourself, aren't you?"
"Not in these matters."
"Will I have to hate you before I get over you?" Unhappiness in his eyes.
"I said I was out of my depth here."
She dug her fingers into his shoulders until he winced, a creature of unrest, kneading away her growing frenzy and her own sense of loss. She tossed hair out of her eyes. Hollywoodish.
"Screw her, leave her."
"You haven't been listening worth a damn."
"Then say what I want to hear!"
"I've told you the truth. Now take your well-earned holiday and think it over, Eden."
"I can bring this room, shit, this crummy goddamned motel down around our heads. I can destroy both of us here!"
"You can do disastrous things. I bear witness. Go ahead, throw all of your toys out the window and break your crayons. It won't change the picture of yourself in your coloring book."
Eden slumped against him with a low and mournful sound.
"All right, little beauty. All right, now."
He stroked her rigid shoulders and the cold nape of her neck.
"Just hold me a little while longer, Tom." Her body quaked but her voice had lost its spiteful grit.
"For as long as you like."
"And tell me that you're hurting. Even though it's not much of a hurt."
"If I confess to that, you'll know rather too much, won't you? Could present an obstacle in the relationship we must work very hard to maintain."
"Oh, boy, all the answers. The voice of pure reason. Tom Terrific, truth-bringer."
"Speaking of hurts, actually it's your bony knee digging into my bad one, and that does hurt plenty. I may whimper."
Eden shifted her weight, briefly thinking about giving him a hard nudge in the groin with her knee. Those little sulfurous bubbles of spite still showing up in the bloodstream. But she was deadly tired and, after strenuous sex, parts of her body felt like leftovers from
The Rape of the Sabine Women
. Presumably he was already sore enough.
She kissed him, sensing no reluctance on his part, relaxed, and let her mouth linger beside his, lips moving speechlessly. Then she rolled away and raised on one elbow, looked at him. Eyes drowsy, refocusing slowly.
"I do love you. Someday you'll know how much. Our relationship will just have to live with that. Now let's get out of this dump; the wind coming in around that window is beginning to depress me. Whether or not Bertie can heal her wounds, how easy can that be and meanwhile she'll need us."
JUBILATION COUNTY, GEORGIA
JULY 22, 1926
10:44 A.M.
C
ap 'n Hobbs ridin 'here
Black horse rider
Buckshot in his gun, huh!
Hammers on the Dumas line
Buddy don't you fall, huh!
Jesus done forgot his long-time man
Oh buddy don't you fall
Crazy in my head, huh!
Hurtin 'in my soul
Hear that hammer ring, boy
Down in the dark hour's dream
His name was Jericho Smith.
Smith, and the others on his chain, the guards around them each broiling day, knew that much about him, but not much more. What they knew best was to leave him alone.
Not that Smith was dangerous or a troublemaker, one of those hapless convicts on the squad chain who made life even more difficult for themselves with an incautious word, a slack work ethic, or a wrong look at a harassing guard, which earned punishment brutal beyond the pains of a long day's labor with hammers, shovels, pickaxes. There were other Negroes on his chain with powerful frames, but Smith was the tallest, his shoulders wider, his arms more powerful than any of the rest. He set a tireless pace at the track-laying site with his nine-pound hammer while the labor gang's slow chorus accompanied the spike-driving, steel-ringing strokes. Hammers on the Dumas line.
Smith knew what those words meant, because the straight stretch of railroad track was where he had spent all of his conscious life. The track that came out of the woods half a mile to the west, lying alongside a flat cotton field and a red dirt road straight as the track itself. He knew west because that was where the sun set every day. He didn't know where Dumas was. He knew only the horizon and the chain and the eighty dark men he worked with, the narrow road and the dusty cotton field. The birds on the telephone wire and the insects in the dry weeds of the ditch. The same clouds in the same sky, day after day. The heat and sweat and moaning and work. The brutal guards, the man on the black horse who ruled the guards and whose name was Hobbs. A thin man with war wounds, part of his face wrenched sideways, one eye rigidly pale as ice. Wore jodhpurs and polished brown boots and a campaign hat. Tobacco in one cheek. Smith knew just when Cap'n Hobbs would lean down from the saddle and spit vilely in the dust. All day long. The same times, the same way.
The Dumas line never seemed to get longer, for all of their hard work and track-laying. Every day he swung the sailie hammer at the same spikes in the same place until it was time, sun growing red in the sky, to lay 'em down.
But who was Jesus?
he sometimes wondered.
And what were those dreams of the dark hour?
It was the dark hour during which he lay down on a thin filthy mattress (
Know it musta been a bedbug, chinch can't bite that hard
), his head on a pillow covered with an evil-smelling flour sack, the collective sweat and grime of his days, linked to the "building chain" after the prisoners' evening feed of fried sowbelly, cornpone, and sorghum, their unvarying meal. Lay down as he knew he must but not to sleep. Or if he slept he had no memory of what sleep was like. Close his eyes and open them again to the rousting cry, still dark outside, torches in the prison camp yard, trucks waiting, pee and eat and go to the squad chain, jolt down another rutted clay road to the Dumas line, wait for a glimmer of light in the east to pick 'em up and go to work.
Smith never spoke to any of the other prisoners during the short ride to the Dumas line or while they rested, after the midday feed. Yet he knew all about them without having to ask, just as he knew everything he could want to know about the guards or Hobbs, the black horse rider. He knew names and knew their crimes, much of it petty although there were men on his chain who had committed rape or murder. He knew secrets and torments. They just came to him, unbidden, like flies to the dried salts on his skin. He knew about sweethearts, children, despair. What he knew nothing about was himself. Where he had come from, why he was there.
Hobbs leaning down from his saddle to spit, straightening with an angry sweep of his good eye, looking out for the men he would remove from the chain that evening, give them the strop, then a medieval pillory in which prisoners were locked into wooden stocks, left to hang in midair by their wrists and ankles until they passed out.
The sweat began to sting their eyes by nine in the morning.
Wiping it off here!
Wipe it off.
Smith couldn't tell time, and of course he had no need to, but he knew exactly at what point in his daily labors the mule wagons would plod by on the road. He knew when the six crows would float down to a light, one at a time, on the sagging telephone line. He knew when, having raised his hammer above his strong shoulders for the hundredth or two hundredth time, he would catch a glimpse of a hawk in full wingspread above the pine woods and marvel at its freedom. He knew when he would shift his eyes and find Cap'n Hobbs looking hard at him, and he knew with that little push he could give things in his mind the captain's good eye would be made to shift away from him, and there would be no blood-biting lash for Jericho Smith after the day's work, no pick shack locked to his already-burdened legs, no sweatbox assigned out of idle malice. Bored and ignorant men could turn vicious on a whim.
Yet they all sensed it was wise to leave Smith alone.
The man chained to his immediate right had stolen twelve dollars from a market to feed his children. He had been sentenced to eight years on the chain.
Smith wondered, at a certain time of each day, what his sentence was for, and how long it would last.
The thief had developed a hernia working on the chain. Smith knew exactly when he would sink to his knees, paralyzed from agony, and the guards would come to take him off the chain, cursing him as they loaded him roughly into the back of one of the prison camp trucks.
Screams.
Jesus done forgot his long-time man
.
Smith wondered where the prisoner with the hernia was taken, yet he was always there in the torch lit yard the next day, which was this day, and the day before, waiting patiently to become another link on the chain.