God's Fool (2 page)

And I ask you: What manner of God would stop them? Would bring down his foot? Would turn them, laughing, to blood and bone?

I see Christopher there, my little boy grown tall and lean, his wrists protruding a full three inches from the sleeves. I can feel his thrill at a solid hit, the sting of a little green ball in his side. I’ve imagined myself there so often now that my imagining has taken on the color of memory. You
say this is wrong? Who was it, I want to know, who first divided history from dream, who ran his finger down the ranges of the past and decreed a frontier where none had been? When was the treaty that gave us this damnable map, and who gave it authority? No, I’ll say it once and be done with it: There is no frontier, in this world or any other, that love or desire or pain can’t cross.

II.

He’s asleep, the old fool, his face pressed into the crimson pillow, his hands hanging between his knees. How he grumbled and spit when I woke him, sitting on the edge of the bed like a big gray child, fumbling with his buttons, grousing at the cold. The fire started quickly. We have a good store of applewood left from the fall. He asked if it was the pain again. I lied. I’ll not go traipsing about the country of a night like this. The sound of the ice comes in from the dark; the dogs’ bones have welded themselves to the dirt. As though the Yankees, having imposed their will on us, now felt free to impose their weather as well
.

Gideon could tell me what it is that clenches my heart like a tomato in a vise. With Gideon dead I’ll as soon stay where I am and trust to fate, though looking at my brother sleeping next to me, his white-whiskered face an inch from my shoulder, his nose abloom with tiny red roads, I wonder at my faith. Perhaps like an old dog I prefer the familiar kick to the unfamiliar smile, the uncertainty of a new allegiance
.

Restless, restless, my head full of whisperings I can’t make out. Waking into the dark tonight, still half in my dreams, I heard the creak and boom of doors closing deep in the core of things. The lake, adjusting itself. Breaking to the wheel. Or, like me, resisting that accommodation
.

He twitches his paws in his sleep, then shifts with the cold. I adjust the blanket, drawing it up around our shoulders
.

III.

In the summer of 1856 the road to Kernville was little more than a dirt track, soft as talcum, and when the last rain came it raised puffs of dust like bullets all along the way. Dark little circles appeared on the wagon, the harness, the children’s feet. And then stopped. The dust joined the layers already whitening the roadside brambles wagon-high and wagon-deep like blight, and stayed. We clung to the things we knew—the smell of rain, the splintered helve, the weight of slops or stone—but even these, it seemed, struggled to escape us. Nothing came easy. The corn was slow that year, barely knee-high by August.

And yet I think back on that time fondly. We all still lived in the house at Mount Airy then, Addy and Sallie making out as best they could, the children always underfoot. Christopher was barely eleven, seemingly convinced the world had gone deaf, forever climbing, like a cricket in a jar, to the top of anything handy. Josephine and Catherine were ten and inseparable. Natural mothers to man and beast, quick with the salve and the sticking plaster, they spent their days nursing what the dogs didn’t kill—mainly three-legged tortoises with stars on their shells—in the hospital hard by the chicken coop. My Nannie, marshaling the younger ones—James and Susan, Patrick and Victoria—would arrange funeral services for those who succumbed to her sisters’ ministrations, as well as
for the parade of cat-killed moles and newborn possums left each night like vestal offerings on the doorstep or the parlor rug.

By the time we awoke, the procession would be winding its way through the locust trees and past the sheds to the bald spot by the garden. There the deceased would be laid to rest with appropriate solemnity (unless one of the dogs happened to make off with him, which would change the spirit of the proceedings considerably) under a cross of twigs tied together with twine. Everyone had a role. James would always dig, I remember; Susan would cover; Patrick or Victoria would drop the sweaty little handfuls of violets or phlox. And saddened but virtuous, they’d make their way home. What sweet days those were. I’ve never had tomatoes like the ones that grew there, trellising themselves on the children’s crosses, bearing them down with the weight of their fruit.

Hindsight is the Almighty’s compensation for brittle bones and shattered sleep. We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands—whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention—but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us.

It’s been fifty-eight years since Chee-kou died, but I can still feel the warmth of the feathers in the hollow of her back, see the place on the bank of the Meklong where we taught her to hop on one leg and quack for food and walk across a wire—her wings out like a tightrope walker—straight into my arms. Sitting here I can see the saplings to which we tied the wire. I can smell the mud, the fish rotting in the roots, feel the sun like a fevered hand resting on the back of our necks.
And there!—like a quick stab, so sudden, so unutterably familiar—our mother’s voice, calling us back to the boat and home. I can see her glance up from her work—
Where are they?
—unaware that her boys are doddering old men sitting before a fire a lifetime away, who, dreaming their old men’s dreams, suddenly hear her calling their names.

IV.

We’d had no rain to speak of since May that year. The livestock barely moved, the flies were unbearable. My brother was untroubled. Divine dispensation, he said, looking at the rows of bolted lettuce in the garden. I could hardly argue. The Lord in His Whimsy had apparently decided to cook us all, sinners and saved alike.

Our morning sessions on the porch had begun by then, and twice a week and once on Sundays we would repair outside, my brother to study the wisdom of God, I to contemplate the many roads to damnation, as he so neatly put it. There was little help for it. I can still see us there, like clerks behind the old dining-room table, he quietly mumbling his way through Deuteronomy, I trying to calculate approximately how long it might take him, having pushed off from Egypt, so to speak, to reach the land of Canaan. In the first hour he turned the page once, I swear, then turned it back, apparently having missed something. Eventually Aunt Grace would waddle out and ask if there was anything we’d be wanting. “Deliverance,” I would say. My brother would say nothing, secure in my torment.

A summer of nights, as I remember it now. Everything that happened that season seemed to happen between dusk and dawn. Our slaves, laboring under the overseer’s less-than-vigilant eye, topped and suckered
the tobacco at dawn, scraped the rows by lantern light. On Sunday nights we would allow them to go down to the sandy little beach that used to lie just below the bluff before the floods erased it in ’62. Even on the darkest nights you could see it from the rise—a wide, sharp tooth, floating in the dark. The women would lay out the food on the bank (you could see the watermelons like a clutch of great, dark eggs, cooling in the mud), then wade slowly into the current with the smaller children on their hips, their dresses momentarily blossoming around them, then trailing off downstream. They walked with a slow, pushing motion, their arms swinging in a loose arc as if sowing the river with the cornbread or honey cake they offered now and again to the babes on their sides. If you watched from the trees, as Eng and I did, early on, you would suddenly notice one of the older men standing waist-deep and still, a seam opening in the river just below his hips, staring off toward the opposite shore. Lost in the shadows, holding his hat to his chest like a supplicant, he would look just like an old, half-flooded stump, only the smear of pipe smoke lifting away from the current giving him away.

I wonder what they thought about out there. Were they remembering some woman in a cornfield after dark? Or the children they’d lost? Were they coming again to a particular crossroads, half a century back—willing their feet to turn, turn now, while they still had the chance? Or did the road seem straight as a shovel handle to them—men born slaves—pruned of all possibility? Standing there, the current gently pushing at their legs, did they find themselves marveling at the speed with which the cards had been dealt and played? Or were they thinking instead of how expertly the deck had been rigged before they ever entered the game?

Useless questions. Were one of them to appear before the fire tonight—ugly and knowing as a terrapin, running his hand over his scarred and crinkled scalp—perhaps I’d ask him.

V.

What can I say about him now? What can any father say about his son?

I could say that we understood one another,
knew
each other, in a way that had nothing to do with our daily lives, but ran beneath that landscape like a vein of iron ore. Or that his smile was as familiar to me as anything I’ll ever know. I could say that he was my first—the world made right, whole-limbed and single. But these things cannot begin to sum him. On the night he was born he looked at me through his watery, reddened eyes and I felt some small, furious thing inside me suddenly still. He was my peace, my understanding, my key. He was my answer to questions I barely understood. He was beautiful.

Though I punished him enough, God knows, I was loath to disappoint him. Or stand in his way. Not that it would have been that easy, necessarily. More than anyone else I ever knew, Christopher had his own mind, and quietly obeyed its dictates. Defiance—for its own sake, at least—had nothing to do with it; he would accommodate me when possible. Having made up his mind to do something, however, nothing would move him. He would go his way. I could wear out my arm—and had, more than once—to little effect.

I still remember my surprise the first time I saw him there among them. He couldn’t have been more than eleven at the time. A strange sight, my
boy among all those blacks—I don’t know that I ever got quite used to it. Yet I let it go. The late nights by the river didn’t hurt him; his lessons were as strong the next day, his chores completed no more slowly than usual. When I noticed that he had struck up a friendship with Lewis’s son, Moses, I did not discourage it. They were friends for years. I can still see them leaping down the grass slope to the stream, or coming out of the corn, the rope between them heavy with whiskery bullheads. Once, when we came across them wrestling in the dust, tearing their clothes and cursing in ways we hadn’t known they knew, we quietly backed off and left them to it. I might have felt differently had it been someone else.

We’d bought Lewis, his father, in Richmond for six hundred dollars. Fourth on the block that still, sultry morning, after two sickly looking boys and a comely wench in a blue dress, there was something about him (though he had to be held up by two men, having recently been beaten) that caught my attention. A certain look. Eng, though skeptical, allowed himself to be convinced, and after assuring ourselves that no permanent damage had been done and that his general state of health was good, we bought him from a bulgy, uncooked-looking individual who claimed to have seen us in a show, years earlier. He’d thought we were fake, he said.

“Did you?” I remember my brother asking.

“I sure did,” he said. “There was a little midget there too, quick as a cat. Figured he was real enough. And a woman, big as a house.” He slapped at a horsefly that had lit on his neck, crushed it between his fingers without looking at it, and tossed it in the dirt. He scratched the reddened bite. “I seen the Living Skeleton too. Arms no bigger round ’n this,” he said, extending a finger with a long, untrimmed nail. “They had to bring him out in a chair.” He nodded, remembering. “Well, good luck with the nigger,” he said. “Glad to be shut of him, myself.” And with that he left.

•     •     •

We brought him back in irons, I remember, lying on a bed of straw we spread over the boards of the wagon. An hour or two into our journey I turned around to find him sitting up with his back against the sideboard, watching the country pass. He didn’t move. Though I knew he must have seen me turn (he was looking almost directly past me), he refused to even glance my way, but just sat there, his head lolling slightly on his neck with every jolt and roll of the wagon, staring out across those hot Virginia fields as if acknowledging my presence wasn’t worth the effort required to turn his head.

I waited. Nothing. I stared at him, willing him to turn. A bluebottle lit on his face, just below the split lip. Nothing. I watched it walk up to the edge of the cut. And suddenly I knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never turn so long as I wanted him to, that we could circumnavigate the globe a dozen times over, my poor oblivious brother at the helm, and, unless something interfered, remain precisely as we were, a sculpture in flesh and bone, a study in stubbornness:
Chang Contemplating the Bust of a Slave
.

His pride—if that was what it was—infuriated me. It seemed almost contrary to nature, like a mole chattering at a mastiff, or a rabbit showing its teeth. Yet there was something fascinating in it as well. Trapped by circumstance, a slave for life, he would defend his collection of invisible dignities to the death, stake his claim to a pebble in the ditch—not that one, this one—and obstinately refuse to budge. I had heard of condemned men refusing to eat their last meal without a napkin, or stubbornly refusing to duck their heads into the noose. This was no different. It made things difficult. It changed nothing.