“You might want to be still,” he said, “so I don’t have to shoot you.”
He lifted from his bent-over position, and the way the moonlight laid on him I could see his face clear enough under the brim of his hat. It was a rough old face, sharp and ragged, like farm equipment. Part of that raggedness was the tangled whiskers he wore.
“I wasn’t gonna steal nothing,” I said.
“No?” he said. “You could have fooled me.”
“I was leaving a horse and a watch in trade,” I said.
“You was, was you?” He looked about, settled on Jesse. “That bag of bones there was any older it could be the Trojan horse.”
I didn’t know what the Trojan horse was, but I figured it was old.
“I left a watch, too,” I said.
“You did, did you?”
“I did,” I said, and wanted to get up bad, because I had fallen in a big pile of horse shit. Not only was it wet and coming through my shirt, it also smelled something vicious.
“How’s that watch tick?” he asked.
I made a ticking noise with my mouth.
“No, not that,” he said. “Does it work good?”
“Works fine, though the glass is a mite scratched from coins and such in Pa’s pocket.”
“But you can still see the hands well enough?”
“If your eyes are good.”
“Thing is, though, I already got a pocket watch.” After a few moments of studying on me, he said, “I ought to jerk a knot in your dick, son, out here messing in my horse pen.”
“I’m kind of desperate,” I said.
“Are you, now?” he said.
We settled in this position for a while, as if we was posing for a painting, then this fella looks at the sky, says, “You needed to come from the other side, by the barn, climb over the corral, chase the horse into the barn, where you couldn’t be seen. A horse, if he’s in the barn, isn’t so excited about being bothered or about someone trying to separate him from the others. Less likely to make noise.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. I thought it best to be polite and let him keep the lead.
“Well, it’s a minor horse-stealing detail, but I figured if horse thieving was to be your career, you might want a few pointers.”
“Have you been at that kind of work?” I asked.
“I have, but it was in the war, so we considered it all right to steal a horse.”
“I’m in kind of a war, so I reckon I was seeing it the same way.”
“Were you, now?”
I was propped on my elbows, trying to get a read on the fellow, wondering if I could leap up and dart through the corral slats and make a run for it. But something about the way he held that pistol like it was one of his fingers led me to staying still.
“Tell you what,” he said, after what seemed time enough for daylight to be on the rise. “Why don’t you tell me why you was stealing my horse.”
“You want to hear all that?” I said.
“Asked, didn’t I?”
I considered some lies but decided I wasn’t up to it. I told it like it happened, making sure to mention the first horse I had stolen I had let go and that it was probably already back at the livery doing whatever it was horses liked to do there in the middle of the night.
“That is quite a story,” he said when I finished.
“It’s the truth.”
“Is it, now?”
“True as I can tell it,” I said, which after I said it pained me a little, because it sounded like I had told a lie and dressed it up as the truth.
“You swear it’s true?”
“I swear by it.”
“Did you get along with your mama?” he asked.
“Right well. Got along good with my pa, too. And I like grits and ain’t got no hatred for turnip greens if they’re seasoned right.”
“That pa of yours got burned up?” he said. “That’s the one you liked?”
“He’s the only one I had.”
“I had two daddies,” he said. “One that made me, and the one that raised me. I didn’t get along all that well with either one of them. Well, I don’t know how I’d have gotten along with the one that made me, on account of I never got the chance to find out. Him running off the way he did put a crimp in our relationship.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“You get those ears from your ma or your pa?”
“My pa,” I said.
“That’s a relief. If it was your ma, she was going to spend a lot of time wearing a head scarf. A man can deal with ears like that. All right. Get up.”
He gun-pointed me up to the house, took me around to the back of it, and had me take off my horse-shit-covered shirt and pants and toss away my shoes. He marched me inside the house naked. I was starting to fear the plans this fellow had might be worse than Ruggert’s.
Turned out he had some of his old clothes for me. I put them on like he asked. I had to cuff up the bottoms of the pants slightly; the shirt hung loose on me. I was a young man, but six-two tall, so you can figure the size of my captor. I reckoned him having two inches on me in height and about ten inches across. His shoulders was wide enough he had to turn a little sideways when we come through the door, and his chest looked like a barrel had been stuffed under his shirt. He had a bit of a paunch, but you couldn’t really call him a fat man.
The house itself was good-sized. You could have put our old house into it three, maybe four times, and had a room for Jesse and at least a half dozen chickens and a visiting mule. There was other rooms off the one I was standing in. There was some rugs on the wall, which seemed like an odd place for rugs. There was a bit of a smoky smell in the room, and that was because the stove was leaking wood smoke, the damper not working just right. There was also in the air the smell of something good cooking. It made my stomach knot up like a hangman’s rope.
I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I noticed he put the pistol into its holster and hung his hat on a peg by the door. I took a good look at him now. My guess was when he was young he might have been handsome, but that face he was wearing now looked as if it had been whipped raw, left out in the rain, and sun-dried.
“You ate lately?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I said.
“Let’s fix that first. Got nothing but cornbread, but I got some good molasses to dip it in.”
I studied on him to figure if he was serious. He seemed to be. I said, “That would be just fine, if you can spare the grub.”
“It’s you and me or the ants get it.”
Now, he had lied to me a bit. There was certainly some cornbread and molasses, but it was fresh baked, and he had a big pot of pinto beans to go with it, seasoned with onion, bacon, salt, and a right smart bit of hot garden peppers.
He had me sit down and served me like he was working for me. It made me nervous. I hadn’t never had no white person do anything like that for me. He heaped beans on my plate, brought out a big jar of molasses with a ladle in it, then he brought me a cup and poured some coffee.
He fixed his own plate then, sat down at the other end, and eyeballed me. I said, “Thank you, sir, for not shooting me and for feeding me.”
“Well, I can still shoot you after you eat.”
That stopped a spoonful of beans midway to my mouth.
“Nah,” he said, showing me he had a nice set of teeth. “I’m just joshing with you. So you got old Sam Ruggert after you?” He of course knew about this, as I had laid it all out to him honestly while lying in horse shit in the corral.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and by this time I was a little bold, knifing up some butter and putting it on my cornbread, heaping spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, touching it off with milk from a pitcher. “You know him, sir?”
“Me and him went to the war together. I used to be a preacher in the church we attended.”
“Preacher?” I said.
“Before the war. It was an easy living. They paid you for it, and yo
u could empty the collection plates every Sunday. It’s a delightful racket. It don’t seem right to me now that I’ve quit being religious. I have come to think that if your job is to spread the message and get paid for it, then you don’t believe it. And I got tired of having to figure out how to explain the Bible saying one thing in one place and another in another place. Mostly you just preached around it—picked out the things that sounded good and ignored the rest. Finally I decided I’d be a Christian without all that Christ nonsense.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I just try and do right because it’s right, and I don’t need no other reason. Goodness for goodness’ sake. Which is not to say that if you mess with me I won’t shoot your goddamn balls off.”
It wasn’t a smart question to ask, but I was itching to ask nonetheless. “Before the war, did you have slaves?”
“Four, and they were hard workers. Then one day, while I was still a preacher, I came across the stories about slaves in Egypt again, and about how they were freed by Moses and ran off, and he parted the waters, and all manner of shit that’s just too hard to believe. But it got me thinking. Here I am talking about them poor Hebrew slaves, and tearing up as I preached on it like I was there with them, and I got me four slaves at home. There was what I like to call a goddamn conflict. How’s them beans?”
“Fine, sir.”
“Good. You see, I had me one older slave that was always telling me how close we was, how he was glad I fed and housed him and such, and when the War between the States come, I sold them other three and kept him. I left him to take care of the property while I was away fighting, thinking we’d have those Yankees whipped in six months. Well, we didn’t. When I finally come limping back here, the whole place was run-down, and Chase, which is what I called the old colored man, had run off and made his way up north, taking some of my goods with him. I thought right then he didn’t love me nearly so much as he said, and I thought, too: why should he? My wife, who was alive for another year before the pox got her, said she couldn’t believe he’d do that after all we’d done for him. He even took a big shit in the middle of the floor. Right there.”
He pointed out the scene of the crime, which wasn’t too far from the table.
“Slipped in here and done that before he left so my wife would find it.”
I studied where he was pointing.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s been years ago, and it’s been cleaned up some time now.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“It doesn’t sound like much, but that thing right there, him doing that, running off, got me thinking maybe a colored slave wasn’t so different from a Hebrew slave, and I give in to another way of thinking. After I did I could never preach again. I was ruined for it. I had always used the sermon about Ham, who saw his father, Noah, naked and how Noah cursed Ham’s son for it. Cursed him because his father had seen his balls. Not Ham himself, but his son—Canaan—and all his descendants. Made them black, is how I was taught, and doomed to slavery for that ball watching. It made sense to me then, cause I hadn’t never thought on it. After the war I did consider it. I didn’t go around trying to spy me some men’s balls, but I’ve seen a few, which is a thing that will happen if you’re in the army or in a Yankee prison camp, like I was. Seeing them balls and them seeing mine didn’t make me want to curse no one with slavery for generations. It was bullshit, and I seen that clear as a sunny day.”
“You actually seen my balls,” I said, referring to my changing clothes in front of him.
He recollected a little, then laughed. “I guess I have, though I didn’t lay considerable observation on them.”
“I could lay a curse on you,” I said, “and from now on all white men will be slaves.”
He really laughed then, so hard in fact I thought he was going to fall off his chair and roll on the floor. It wasn’t that funny, but I guess it was causing him to let something stove up inside of him out. Laughing was good for that.
When he got his mind and mouth in line again, he said, “You know, Noah must have had one ugly set to have been offended so bad to have them spied on. I mean, that’s something, isn’t it? You’ve peeped on my nut sack, so a whole generation and their generations gets cursed.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Them must have been the ugliest nuts ever hung between a pair of legs.”
He grinned, and then his mind settled into something darker. The grin washed off his face like a stick-drawn line in the dirt washed away by fast water. “You know, my son went off in that war, too. Got killed the first day he was in a battle. He’s buried some sad place up in Virginia. He fought far away from me. Over in another part of the war—another theater, you might call it. Sometime after it happened, after I was out of the prison camp and home, a fellow that had been with him looked me up and gave me Tad’s pocket watch. He said it had stopped the moment he was shot and therefore was some kind of recognition from God of his death. Well, I had already come to that realization about Ham and Noah and Canaan, and had come to certain conclusions about slavery, but this clinched it. I’m thinking, my boy gets shot, and his watch stops, and that’s a sign from God? He couldn’t make that bullet miss or bring my boy home to me or bring him back from the dead, but he’d go to the trouble to stop a watch? How can they be sure his watch stopped at the exact moment of death in all the confusion of battle? Maybe it just stopped because he fell on it or some such. Before that moment, little signs like that meant something to me. A cloud shaped like an angel’s wings. A hawk flying overhead with a snake in its mouth.
“What happened to me when that fellow gave me that watch and went on his way was I gave the whole thing furious thought. God’s bucket from then on didn’t tote water. That bucket had a hole in it. I come to think on that watch some more, and it come to me that God wasn’t all loving. He was like a big watchmaker, and we were the innards of his watch, and this here earth we stand on is the watch’s slippery surface. Once God got the watch made, set it ticking, he sat back and said, ‘Well, good luck to you son of a bitches, cause I’m done.’ ”
I studied on his reasoning a bit, and damn if it didn’t make some sense to me, which scared me a little. If the big man was right, we was all on our own out here.
He looked at me just then, as if watching a bug crawl across my face, said, “Pie?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Want a piece of pie? I got an apple pie in the warmer, and it looked to me it might have turned out all right, though it’s slightly sunk in the middle.”
It did turn out all right, and we ate it up, the whole damn pie. Drank about a pot of coffee, then he took me out back and we walked to a field that lay beyond what I had seen before. It was cleared, except for a few stumps and a giant oak out there in the middle of it, and there were chairs under it. We sat in them. Above us was this big gap in the limbs, like a window between tree and sky. You could look up and see the stars real good. That’s what we did, him explaining to me that there was things called constellations, and positioned as we were in our chairs, we was looking right at one. He told me what it was, but the name of it has faded from my mind now. I didn’t really care about any of that right then, so maybe it never really stuck to me. I was full of food and felt worn to a nubbin, in spite of all that coffee. Somewhere along the way, between him chattering about this set of stars and another, my head tossed back and I closed my eyes and slipped off to sleep like I was gently sliding down a muddy slope into a field of soft, dry grass and darkness.
3
When I woke up the next morning I was covered in dew, or at least my face was, but I had a thick blanket tossed over me, and I was beginning to get a little warm. Cracking an eye open, I found I was still under that oak out in the middle of the field.
Getting up, I stretched and seen there had been a note laid out on the ground, held down with a couple of rocks. It was dew-damp but not ruined. There was an arrow drawn on it, and that pointed toward the house. I reckoned on it for a
while, trying to decide should I go back up to the house, or should I light out west. Thing made me decide was thinking on that excellent meal I’d had the night before, and there being most likely some kind of breakfast back at the house. Maybe I could pay for it by working it off. I knew there was some all-right white people, but last night I had come to consider there might even be some good ones. Then again, it could be like putting cheese in a rat trap, and that dinner last night was the cheese, and I’d get down to the house, and there Ruggert would be, waiting with a tall horse and a short rope.
Giving it a final turnabout in my head, I started down to the house. When I come up to the corral, the big fellow was out there feeding the horses, pouring grain from a sack into the trough.
“There you are,” he said. “I had a mind to think you run off.”
“Considered it,” I said.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Here’s how we’ll do it. Go in the house, have you some biscuits—they’re in the warmer—and pour you a cup of coffee. Have two cups if you like. You’re going to get sweaty when you come back, cause I’m going to put you to work, but if you need to take a bath—and from the way the wind is blowing your stink on me, I suspect you do—then there’s some hot water on the stove to put in the tub. It’s enough for a good splash bath, not much more. It will make you better to stand out here in the field with. Do that, then come out to the far field and we’ll pick some tomatoes. I done got the bags and such, so all you got to do is show. Is that fair enough to you, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
I went in the house, had two biscuits slathered in butter, drank two cups of coffee that I put milk and sugar in, poured water in the number 10 washtub that had been set out near the stove, and worked on my filthy body with some lye soap. I picked ticks and chiggers till I thought I got them all, then dressed and did a turn at the outhouse out back. Having had a refreshing morning constitutional, I strolled to where my host was working.