Song of Solomon

  Milkman became agile, pulling himself up the rock face, digging his knees into crevices, searching with his fingers for solid earth patches or ledges of stone. He left off thinking and let his body do the work. He stood up, finally, on level ground twenty feet to the right of the mouth of the cave. There he saw a crude footpath he might have found earlier if he had not been so hasty. That was the path the hunters used and that Pilate and his father had also used. None of them tore their clothes as he had, climbing twenty feet of steep rock.

  He entered the cave and was blinded by the absence of light. He stepped back out and reentered, cupping his eyes. After a while, he could distinguish the ground from the wall of the cave. There was the ledge of rock where they’d slept, much larger than he had pictured. And worn places on the floor where fires had once burned, and several boulders standing around the entrance—one with a kind of V-shaped crown. But where were the bones? Circe said they dumped him in here. Farther back, probably, back where the shallow pit was. Milkman had no flashlight and his matches were certainly wet, but he tried to find a dry one anyway. Only one or two even sputtered. The rest were dead. Still, his eyes were getting used to the dark. He pulled a branch from a bush that grew near the entrance and bending forward, let it graze the ground before him as he walked. He had gone thirty or forty feet when he noticed the cave’s walls were closer together. He could not see the roof at all. He stopped and began to move slowly sideways, the branch tip scratching a yard or so ahead. The side of his hand grazed rock and he flung the dry bat shit off it and moved to the left. The branch struck air. He stopped again, and lowered the tip until it touched ground again. Raising it up and down, and pressing it back and around, he could tell that he had found the pit. It was about two feet deep and maybe eight feet wide. Frantically he scraped the branch around the bottom. It hit something hard, again something else hard. Milkman swallowed and dropped to his knees. He squinted his eyes as hard as he could, but he couldn’t see a thing. Suddenly he remembered a lighter in his vest pocket. He dropped the branch and fumbled for it, almost faint from the money smell—the twinkling lights, the piano music. He pulled it out, praying it would light. On the second try, it burst into flame and he peered down. The lighter went out. He snapped it back and held his hand over its fragile flame. At the bottom of the hole he saw rocks, boards, leaves, even a tin cup, but no gold. Stretched out on his stomach, holding the lighter in one hand, he swept the bottom with the other, clawing, pulling, fingering, poking. There were no fat little pigeon-breasted bags of gold. There was nothing. Nothing at all. And before he knew it, he was hollering a long, awwww sound into the pit. It triggered the bats, which swooped suddenly and dived in the darkness over his head. They startled him and he leaped to his feet, whereupon the sole of his right shoe split away from the soft cordovan leather. The bats drove him out in a lopsided run, lifting his foot high to accommodate the flopping sole.

  In the sunlight once more, he stopped for breath. Dust, tears, and too bright light were in his eyes, but he was too angry and disgusted to rub them. He merely threw the lighter in a wide high arc into the trees at the foot of the hills and limped down the footpath, paying no attention to the direction he was going. He put his feet down wherever was most convenient. Quite suddenly, it seemed to him, he was at the creek again, but upstream where the crossing—about twelve feet here and so shallow he could see the stony bottom—was laid across with boards. He sat down and lashed the sole of his shoe to its top with his black string tie, then walked across the homemade bridge. The woods on the other side had a pathway.

  Milkman began to shake with hunger. Real hunger, not the less than top-full feeling he was accustomed to, the nervous desire to taste something good. Real hunger. He believed if he didn’t get something to eat that instant he would pass out. He examined the bushes, the branches, the ground for a berry, a nut, anything. But he didn’t know what to look for, nor how they grew. Trembling, his stomach in a spasm, he tore off a few leaves and put them in his mouth. They were as bitter as gall, but he chewed them anyway, spit them out, and got others. He thought of the breakfast food Mrs. Cooper had put before him, which had disgusted him then. Fried eggs covered with grease, fresh-squeezed orange juice with seed and pulp floating in it, thick hand-cut bacon, a white-hot mound of grits and biscuits. It was her best effort, he knew, but perhaps because of the whiskey he’d drunk the night before, he could only bring himself to drink two cups of black coffee and eat two biscuits. The rest had nauseated him, and what he did eat he had left at Circe’s door.

  Some brush closed in on him and when he swept it angrily aside, he saw a stile and the road in front of him. Macadam, automobiles, fence posts, civilization. He looked at the sky to gauge the hour. The sun was a quarter of the way down from what even he knew was high noon. About one o’clock, he guessed. Nephew would have come and gone. He felt in his back pocket for his wallet. It was discolored at the edges from the water, but the contents were dry. Five hundred dollars, his driver’s license, phone numbers on slips of paper, social security card, airline ticket stub, cleaners receipts. He looked up and down the road. He had to get food, and started walking south, where he believed Danville lay, hoping to hitch as soon as a car came by. He was not only ravenous; his feet hurt. The third car to pass stopped—a 1954 Chevrolet—and the driver, a black man, showed the same interest in Milkman’s clothes that Nephew had shown. He seemed not to notice or care about the rip at the knee or under the arm, the tie-tied shoe, the leaves in Milkman’s hair, or the dirt all over the suit.

  “Where you headed, partner?”

  “Danville. As close as I can get.”

  “Hop on in, then. Little out my way. I cut over to Buford, but I’ll get you closer than you was.”

  “’Preciate it,” answered Milkman. He loved the car seat, loved it. And sank his weary back into its nylon and sighed.

  “Good cut of suit,” the man said. “I guess you ain’t from here’ bouts.”

  “No. Michigan.”

  “Sure ‘nough? Had a aunt move out there. Flint. You know Flint?”

  “Yeah. I know Flint.” Milkman’s feet were singing, the tender skin of the ball louder than the heels. He dared not spread his toes, lest the singing never stop.

  “What kinda place is it, Flint?”

  “Jive. No place you’d want to go to.”

  “Thought so. Name sounds good, but I thought it’d be like that.”

  Milkman had noticed a six-bottle carton of Coca-Cola on the back seat when he got in the car. It was on his mind.

  “Could I buy one of those Coca-Colas from you? I’m kinda thirsty.”

  “It’s warm,” said the man.

  “Long as it’s wet.”

  “Help yourself.”

  Milkman reached around and pulled a bottle out of its case.

  “Got a bottle opener?”

  The man took the bottle from him and put its head in his mouth and slowly pried the top off. Foam shot all over his chin and his lap before Milkman could take it from him.

  “Hot.” The man laughed and wiped himself with a navy-and-white handkerchief.

  Milkman gulped the Coke, foam and all, in three or four seconds.

  “Like another?”

  He did but he said no. Just a cigarette.

  “Don’t smoke,” said the man.

  “Oh,” said Milkman, and struggled against and lost to a long belch.

  “Bus station’s right around the bend there.” They were just outside Danville. “You can make it easy.”

  “I really do thank you.” Milkman opened the door. “What do I owe you? For the Coke and all?”

  The man was smiling, but his face changed now. “My name’s Garnett, Fred Garnett. I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and a lift now and then.”

  “I didn’t mean…I…”

  But Mr. Garnett had reached over and closed the door. Milkman could see him shaking his head as he drove off.

  Milkman’s feet hurt him so, he could ha
ve cried, but he made it to the diner/bus station and looked for the man behind the counter. He wasn’t there, but a woman offered to help. There followed a long discussion in which he discovered that the bag was not there, the man was not there, she didn’t know if a colored boy had picked it up or not, they didn’t have a checkroom and she was mighty sorry but he could look at the station-master’s if the boy didn’t have it, and was there anything else she could do?

  “Hamburgers,” he said. “Give me some hamburgers and a cup of coffee.”

  “Yes, sir. How many?”

  “Six,” he said, but his stomach cramped on the fourth and bent him double with a pain that lasted off and on all the way to Roanoke. But before he left, he telephoned Reverend Cooper. His wife answered and told him that her husband was still at the freightyard and he could catch him there if he hurried. Milkman thanked her and hung up. Walking like a pimp in delicate shoes, he managed to get to the yard, which was fairly close to the bus station. He entered the gate and asked the first man he saw if Reverend Cooper was still there.

  “Coop?” the man said. “I think he went on over to the station house. See it? Right over there.”

  Milkman followed his finger, and hobbled over the gravel and ties to the station house.

  It was empty save for an old man dragging a crate.

  “Excuse me,” Milkman said. “Is Rev—is Coop still here?”

  “Just left. If you run you can catch him,” the man said. He wiped the sweat of exertion from his forehead.

  Milkman thought about running anywhere on his tender feet and said, “Oh, well. I’ll try to catch him another time.” He turned to go.

  “Say,” said the man. “If you ain’t gonna try to catch him, could you give me a hand with this?” He pointed down to the huge crate at his feet. Too tired to say no or explain, Milkman nodded. The two of them grunted and groaned over the box, and finally got it up on a dolly, where they could push it to the weighing platform. Milkman slumped over the crate and caught his breath, barely able to nod to the old man’s thank yous. Then he went out of the station into the street.

  He was tired now. Really tired. He didn’t want to see Reverend Cooper and his success-starved friends again. And he certainly didn’t want to explain anything to his father or Guitar just yet. So he hobbled back to the bus station and asked for the next bus leaving that was going south. It had to be south. And it had to be Virginia. Because now he thought he knew how to find out what had happened to the gold.

  Full of hamburgers, sore of foot, sick to his stomach, but at least sitting down, he couldn’t even feel the disappointment that lay in the pit in the cave. He slept heavily for several hours on the bus, woke and daydreamed, napped a little more, woke again at a rest stop and ate a bowl of pea soup. He went into a drugstore and replaced the shaving equipment and toilet articles he’d left at Reverend Cooper’s, and decided to wait and get his shoe fixed (it was sealed with chewing gum now), his suit mended, and a new shirt in Virginia.

  The Greyhound bus made a sound like the hum of the Weimaraners as it sped down the road, and Milkman shivered a little, the way he had when Circe glanced at them, sitting in the “last room,” wondering if she would outlive them. But there were over thirty of them and reproducing all the time.

  The low hills in the distance were no longer scenery to him. They were real places that could split your thirty-dollar shoes. More than anything in the world he’d wanted it to be there, for row upon row of those little bags to turn their fat pigeon chests up to his hands. He thought he wanted it in the name of Macon Dead’s Georgia peaches, in the name of Circe and her golden-eyed dogs, and especially in the name of Reverend Cooper and his old-timey friends who began to die before their facial hair was out when they saw what happened to a black man like them—“ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict”—who had made it anyway. He also thought he wanted it in the name of Guitar, to erase what looked like doubt in his face when Milkman left, the “I-know-you-gonna-fuck-up” look. There wasn’t any gold, but now he knew that all the fine reasons for wanting it didn’t mean a thing. The fact was he wanted the gold because it was gold and he wanted to own it. Free. As he had sat chomping the hamburgers in the bus station, imagining what going home would be like now—not only to have to say there was no gold, but also to know he was trapped there—his mind had begun to function clearly.

  Circe said that Macon and Sing had boarded that wagon in Virginia, where they both came from. She also said Macon’s body rose up from the ground at the first heavy rain, and that the Butlers, or somebody, dumped it in the hunters’ cave one summer night. One summer night. And it was a body, a corpse, when they hauled it away, because they recognized him as a Negro. Yet Pilate said it was winter when she was there, and there were only bones. She said she went to see Circe and visited the cave four years later, in the snow, and took the white man’s bones. Why didn’t she see her father’s bones? There should have been two skeletons. Did she step over one and collect the other? Surely Circe had told her the same thing she told him—that her father’s body was in the cave. Did Pilate tell Circe that they had killed a man in there? Probably not, since Circe didn’t mention it. Pilate said she took the white man’s bones and didn’t even look for the gold. But she lied. She had not mentioned the second skeleton because it wasn’t there when she got to the cave. She didn’t come back four years later—or if she did, it was her second trip. She came back before they dumped the Negro they found in the cave. She took the bones, all right; Milkman had seen them on the table in the jailhouse. But that’s not all she took. She took the gold. To Virginia. And maybe somebody in Virginia would know.

  Milkman followed in her tracks.

  Chapter 11

  The women’s hands were empty. No pocketbook, no change purse, no wallet, no keys, no small paper bag, no comb, no handkerchief. They carried nothing. Milkman had never in his life seen a woman on the street without a purse slung over her shoulder, pressed under her arm, or dangling from her clenched fingers. These women walked as if they were going somewhere, but they carried nothing in their hands. It was enough to let him know he was really in the backwoods of Virginia, an area the signs kept telling him was the Blue Ridge Mountains. Danville, with its diner/bus station and its post office on the main street was a thriving metropolis compared to this no-name hamlet, a place so small nothing financed by state funds or private enterprise reared a brick there. In Roanoke, Petersburg, Culpeper he’d asked for a town named Charlemagne. Nobody knew. The coast, some said. Tidewater. A valley town, said others. He ended up at an AAA office, and after a while they discovered it and its correct name: Shalimar. How do I get there? Well, you can’t walk it, that’s for sure. Buses go there? Trains? No. Well, not very near. There is one bus, but it just goes to…He ended up buying a fifty-dollar car for seventy-five dollars out of a young man’s yard. It broke down before he could get to the gas station and fill the tank. And when he got pushed to the station, he spent $132 on a fan belt, brake lining, oil filter, gas line filter, two retreads, and a brand-new oil pan, which he didn’t need but bought before the mechanic told him the gasket was broken. It was a hard and bitter price to pay. Not because it wasn’t worth it, and not because it had to be in cash since the garage owner looked at his Standard Oil credit card like it was a three-dollar bill, but because he had got used to prices in the South: socks two pairs for a quarter, resoled shoes thirty cents, shirt $1.98, and the two Tommys needed to know that he got a shave and a haircut for fifty cents.

  By the time he bought the car, his morale had soared and he was beginning to enjoy the trip: his ability to get information and help from strangers, their attraction to him, their generosity (Need a place to stay? Want a good place to eat?). All that business about southern hospitality was for real. He wondered why black people ever left the South. Where he went, there wasn’t a white face around, and the Negroes were as pleasant, wide-spirited, and self-contained as could be. He earned the rewards he got here. None of the pleas
antness was directed at him because of his father, as it was back home, or his grandfather’s memory, as it was in Danville. And now, sitting behind a steering wheel, he felt even better. He was his own director—relieving himself when he wanted to, stopping for cold beer when he was thirsty, and even in a seventy-five-dollar car the sense of power was strong.

  He’d had to pay close attention to signs and landmarks, because Shalimar was not on the Texaco map he had, and the AAA office couldn’t give a nonmember a charted course—just the map and some general information. Even at that, watching as carefully as he could, he wouldn’t have known he had arrived if the fan belt hadn’t broken again right in front of Solomon’s General Store, which turned out to be the heart and soul of Shalimar, Virginia.

  He headed for the store, nodding at the four men sitting outside on the porch, and side-stepping the white hens that were strolling about. Three more men were inside, in addition to the man behind the counter, who he assumed was Mr. Solomon himself. Milkman asked him for a cold bottle of Red Cap, please.

  “No beer for sale on Sunday,” the man said. He was a light-skinned Negro with red hair turning white.

  “Oh. I forgot what day it was.” Milkman smiled. “Pop, then. I mean soda. Got any on ice?”

  “Cherry smash. That suit you?”

  “Fine. Suit me fine.”

  The man walked over to the side of the store and slid open the door of an ancient cooler. The floor was worn and wavy with years of footsteps. Cans of goods on the shelf were sparse, but the sacks, trays, and cartons of perishables and semiperishables were plentiful. The man pulled a bottle of red liquid from the cooler and wiped it dry on his apron before handing it to Milkman.

  “A nickel if you drink it here. Seven cents if you don’t.”

  “I’ll drink it here.”

  “Just get in?”