God's Fool (3 page)

And then it came to me. I would give him his napkin, so to speak, let him place his own head in the noose. I would speak first. “Are you thirsty?” I remember saying to him.

He turned to me then as though seeing me for the first time, his face swollen, his head wobbling only slightly. Something—some inscrutable Negro mixture of surprise and disdain—passed across his face. And in that moment, though I had the distinct urge to strike him across the face,
I knew we understood each other—that we had found a ground on which we could both exist.

He nodded, and I dipped a ladleful of water from the barrel we kept in the back of the wagon, and he drank.

He married Berry late that fall—a steady, yellow-skinned wench we’d acquired some years before. Moses, if I remember rightly, was born the following summer. Perhaps the natural fear of losing his family played a part. In any case, his nature changed. Whatever rage he may have had left he turned, with admirable success, to work. He became a steadying force, a decent husband, a good father to his son.

No one was better at sniffing out a game trail or reading the dogs. No one was better at pushing the bucks out of the briar thickets on a drive, or finding the places where the does bedded down in the heat. When Moses and Christopher were old enough to feel for catfish in the deadfalls at night, it was Lewis who taught them, who showed them how to keep from winding up like Toner Hugg who, three years earlier, had lost his hand in the craw of a big-river blue as big as a sow; a fish with a head the size of a horse, whiskers thick as a man’s thumb.

That same summer, when Christopher, feeling about between the sunken boards and branches, pulled his arm out of the river with a twenty-pound flathead attached to the end of it, it was Lewis who moved before anyone knew what was happening, who jammed a stick through its gills before it could wrench the boy’s arm out of its socket, who stuck a knife through its skull while it thrashed about in the dark without cutting through to the small hand inside its mouth.

Christopher lived off that fish all year. As I did later. For whenever I tried to tally all the happy moments of his boyhood, as I did sometimes in the years that followed—counting them over in the small hours of my nights as though by counting, and counting again, I might arrive by some miracle at a different sum—that long-gone catfish ran high on the list.

That summer no other boy could come close to him. Lewis hacked
off the big whiskery head and laid it on an anthill by the back orchard and when the bones were clean, gave it to Christopher, who hung it on a nail in the tobacco barn after first trying to hang it over the doorsill to the main house. It was a thing they had between them. It hung there for twelve years, I remember, long after either of them was there to see it.

VI.

The summer wore on. The boys squabbled and fought; bruises appeared and disappeared; cuts scabbed and healed over. One of Matlack Benner’s slaves, in the middle of a row, put his head to the ground as if looking for something very small and died.

It was that summer that we got into the habit, after everyone had retired, of walking the mile along the river to Gideon’s for a drink, our double shadow, on moonlit nights, running on ahead. Gideon’s house, with its west-facing porch, was perfectly placed to catch whatever breeze there was to be had, though that summer, as I recall, even the wind seemed to be dying. We sweat sitting still.

I can still see us there on the good doctor’s porch, three slightly drunken watchmen, no longer young, watching over what couldn’t be saved, keeping each other company. No lamp would be lit, not because of the mosquitoes, which seemed to do equally well with or without our help and guidance, but because that August, for its own particular reasons, nature had decided to produce an extra generation of moths, a harvest of biblical proportions.

Drawn by the lamp, they’d come fluttering in from the fields, the forests, from under the shaggy, flaking skin of the locust trees, and by ten there’d be a thousand, maybe more, tracing tiny parabolas and vast, far-flung orbits, drawing tighter to that central sun. We ignored them
for a time, waving away the ones that brushed against our faces, laughing when Gideon’s hounds snapped and smacked their lips at them, jumping whenever a junebug cracked against the glass. And yet, though we tried to ignore it, there was something ghastly in their rush to the flame, something vaguely obscene in their eagerness to die. There was nothing to be done. We sat at the far edges of the storm, the small, burnt bodies piling against the wick, until the night a huge, dark beauty half again the size of a swallow fluttered over the rail, turned once about the porch and then, as though knowing precisely where it was going, stuffed itself carefully down the throat of the lamp. Too late to move, we saw it momentarily block the light, the hieroglyphs of its wings magnified against the walls, then burst into flame.

For a short while, no one spoke. Inside the smoking lamp, two bits of wing still burned, tipped together like cards, or the walls of a house. Leaning over, Gideon gently tapped his pipe against the glass. The cards crumbled. “Not a feather falls,” he said, quietly. And with one small breath he put out the light.

We sat in the dark after that, I remember, listening to the thin quavering in our ears, the rhythmic scratching in the thick, knotted grass, the high invisible armies sawing back and forth over the fields … But even after the moths had gone, the lamp remained unlit. We had grown to like it that way. On particularly dark nights, I’d feel my way to tobacco or table, bottle or glass, listening to the small adjustments of our bodies, the creak of the doctor’s chair against the wall, and there was a comfort in this business of knowing without seeing that the lamp would have taken away.

We talked. My God, how we talked. Gideon had the gift of seeing the world the way another man might see a stone or a root; if the stone was smooth he didn’t imagine it otherwise; if the root was misshapen he didn’t wish it straight. Neither callous nor complacent, he simply had, as he explained it, a high regard for his own insignificance, a firm belief that, despite his best efforts, the sun would rise and foolishness reign. In any other man, this kind of fatalism would have been insufferable; in
Gideon, tempered as it was by the energy and solicitude that he brought to his daily round, sweetened by the heart he tried, and failed, to keep hid behind the wall of his gruffness, it was somehow charming. We completed each other, he and I, we fought like cats in a bag; we drove each other mad. I loved him like a brother—no, more than my own brother, who would become a stranger to me as the years came on and Jesus came between us. In Gideon’s company I could be wholly myself, a thing made possible, somehow, by the fact that he never attempted to overlook our peculiar condition, as Barnum used to call it.

“Welcome, my hyphenated friends,” he would call from the porch as we approached the house, looking every inch the doctor in his crumpled suit (though with his white hair and beard and his beak of a nose he could as easily have passed for some battle-weary general, and actually resembled, though we could hardly have known it then, a slightly stooped Bobby Lee), “welcome to our airless abode.”

By mid-August we had bonfires going all night to draw the moths. Though the heat was fierce for those who had to tend the flames, there was no help for it. Without them, the cotton would have been gone in a week. From Gideon’s porch the fires set along the edges of our fields appeared strangely alive, as though burning inside a blizzard; every now and again a man-shaped space would block out the flames like a woodcut out of Dante, send a gust of sparks soaring into the night, and quickly disappear.

A fever in the land. I believe that if we had stopped and listened, we could have felt it growing. That was the year that John Brown, God singing in his ears, reduced the proslavery population along Pottawatomie Creek by five.

VII.

The truth is I’d never thought about slavery much. It was a fact of life in the country we had come to—a necessary evil, as benign or brutal as the individuals involved in it. If the majority of blacks bore their burden with relative equanimity, it seemed to me, perhaps it was because they instinctively recognized the necessity of their situation. We were all slaves to something, after all—to time, to love. Perhaps the reason Barnum’s crowds had never tired of coming to stare was because our “band of union,” as Dr. Bolton had always called it, had made visible a universal condition. We were the word made flesh.

When I said this to Gideon one night he raised a glass to my eloquence, then suggested that I consider offering my services to the
Charleston Mercury
. If a stump could be found large enough to accommodate us, he said, we could arrange to debate Mr. Wendell Phillips, trope for trope and verse for verse. We’d have the abolitionists on their knees in no time, he said; our sable brethren would cheer. He swiped at the dark in front of his face, then took a long, meditative sip. “Slavery is slavery,” he said. “You can call it necessary. You can call it a blessing and move to Charleston. You can call it God’s will from every pulpit in America, for all I care, but you can’t call it natural.”

I said nothing, as I recall. Neither did my brother. We knew enough by then to stay out of the way on those occasions when Gideon caught
the spirit. And though I would not allow myself to admit it at the time, I knew he had a point. I had seen enough in my life to know that we were all, in our way, creatures of our condition.

Had the king’s physicians succeeded in persuading our mother to have us sawed apart at birth, after all, would I still have believed as I did? Had I been able to walk the streets of Paris with Sophia that winter in 1830 a single man, or to leap from the loveseat on which my brother and I now sat and run off down the road, or to sit on the steps with my son, unattended, would I have been as eager to argue with Mr. Phillips and his fellow abolitionists? To speak for the principle of universal bondage? Or would I have stoutly declared freedom the universal truth, and any attempt to thwart it an offense to man and God?

I held my peace. It hadn’t been that long, after all, since Eng and I had inquired, for the tenth time at least, about the possibility of having ourselves separated, of having the good doctor rend asunder, so to speak, what God in His Wisdom had seen fit to join. Gideon had answered, as he always did, that separating us was hardly the problem. The divorce could be realized in a matter of minutes, he said. Any idiot possessed of a sharp saw and a strong stomach could do it. The problem, he said, was that he’d grown accustomed to our company, which was why he was willing to defer the fame that a scientific description of our condition would bring until such time as we grew either so dull or so annoying that fulfilling our wish began to seem like a good idea.

“And besides,” he’d asked us, “what could you possibly do apart that you haven’t already done together?”

“Nothing,” I’d answered. “But we could do it alone.”

“And this appeals to you? After almost fifty years of living and breathing together? After all you’ve been through?”

“Utterly,” I said, more out of habit than conviction.

He looked at Eng. “And you too?”

We’d been this way before. It was a kind of game we played, my brother and I. Like children who cling to the notion of a particular present long after any real wish for it has faded, who have memorized their
reasons for wanting it and reel them off, in order, at the slightest suggestion, we pretended we truly desired to be separated, dreamed of it daily, while in truth no longer even imagining the thing could come to pass.

He never answered. Looking down at the glass he held against his stomach, my brother scratched at some imagined roughness with his thumbnail, then looked off across the fields to where the fires still gusted and flared against the dark.

VIII.

Samuel was barely two months old when he died. A tiny, listless little thing, he had barely been here at all, and then he was gone. I remember Gideon nearly living at Mount Airy those last two weeks—he was there that much—and then he was standing in front of the bedroom door, shaking his head, and I was swinging a pick at the ground as if to kill something only I could see.

Addy bore the blow better than I did. I threw myself at whatever offered, dragging my brother from task to task, afraid to stop. In less than a week we had fixed a quarter-mile of split-rail fence, begun the new tobacco shed. The sun meant nothing to me. Eng, never a weak man, slogged on beside me, hour after hour, day after day. We worked by lamplight when we couldn’t see, slept like the dead, and began again. Addy came to our bed that week, but though we pleased each other, sweating in the darkness, neither of us took much comfort in the thing. It was a weapon, nothing more—something to wield against the grief—and both of us knew it.

Whether it was because Eng, affected by my loss, had curbed his growing dissatisfaction with me or because I, too distracted by my own thoughts, had simply failed to take notice of his feelings, I don’t know, but I remember that the trouble that had been growing between my brother and myself seemed to recede during those weeks. The flood tide
fell, revealing by degrees the familiar landscape of our life together. We grew close again, retiring and rising without argument, working long hours side by side—handing each other tools, anticipating each other’s needs—with something like the correspondence of mind and body we had for so long taken for granted.

Late that summer, as we did at the midpoint of every month, we loaded the wagon and made the move to Eng’s house, traveling late this time to avoid the heat of the day. Josephine, Christopher, and Stephen went ahead with their mothers, the boys to handle the horses, Josephine to help with the younger children. We followed about an hour later, my Nannie and Victoria sitting in the back with Catherine and Julia; James and Patrick sitting next to their father, taking turns at the reins.

At that time I still enjoyed returning to Eng’s farm. It was a good house, comfortable and well placed. Addy gladly relinquished control to her sister for the fortnight, and I for one didn’t mind the change. The children for their part had grown quite used to the routine, their pangs of regret over the animals they left behind balanced by their joy at renewing acquaintance with those that had been waiting for them. I never ceased being amazed by how the younger ones simply accepted as natural the fact that they should live for two weeks in their father’s house and two weeks in their uncle’s.