BELVOIR
– a novel –
By S. A. Huggins
Copyright 2011 S. A. Huggins
Smashwords Edition
For John and Emerson
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Prologue
He held the knife close to his chest, saying the prayer that had become as much a part of him as the very skin he now sought to excise. With the tip underneath his chin, he spoke three Amens in his head, and at the end of the last one, he moved his fingers from the handle to the blade.
The rock he sharpened the knife with was as ragged as his soul, worn away in parts, broken off, walked and stepped on by others as they had made their paths through the woods, oblivious to the natural upheaval that lay all around them. He summoned the knife to do his bidding once more, to prepare itself and its edge to cut the skin from the body on the ground in front of him, a life that he had run off to another world when he thrust his knife into the back of the neck, twisting it just so until the man had moved no more.
They had yet to say anything, either of those first two. He had used them just as he had been used. It had been unexpected, and it had been fast—his deception. The knife had gone all the way through both times, with the point of a star sticking out through the front, a triangle so small that he was not able to see it even with the dim light from the moon sending its rays through the trees.
None of them would miss him while he was out performing his ceremony. He knew this, every day walking among them and yet not with them, not quite one of them. Some held him separate from what they were because he was different, as if what they didn’t understand was somehow worse than what they did understand. He would watch them sometimes, their simple how-dos and the like, the common pleasantries that lifted their chins, exalting them like puppets at the hands of men instead of at the hand of God. But he had tried not to hate them for that, unlike the voice that spoke to him, telling him what needed to be done, step by step.
The others would not miss him either. They wanted to disown him, he sometimes felt, but their sorrow and pity for him tied them to him so that he was forever theirs. It had not always been this way. This they all knew. There was that day when it had all changed, the way he looked at the world.
He watched the knife befriend the rock again, the scraping sound, a pleasant musical prayer that gave his ear calmness much like the feeling of light rain hitting small puddles, tapping them with fingers made of butterfly wings. When the knife was ready, he said his prayer again, his head bobbing to and fro while he brought his index finger and thumb together at the knife’s tip, exercising a control that would continue until his deed was finished. Always with the fingertips first, but only the tops, only the part that held the darkest skin, the part that needed to go the most. He did the same with the feet and the toes, leaving just enough of the bottoms for the dead man to walk home had he been in a condition to do so, had his skin still been attached to his body, had he still been alive when the sacrifice was over.
The ears, he simply cut right off, no de-skinning, no precision necessary to separate the soft layer of darkness from the gristle underneath. He pulled them at the top, stretching the skin out, cutting there first, where it was easiest. That part of the ear was always the same, but he had noticed a difference at the bottom: the ears were sometimes more attached on one person than they were on another, and it took a tad longer to weave the knife around the attached lobe so it didn’t cut into the cheek or the face or the chin. In those instances, he would follow around the back of the ear where the roundness could lead him so he would not go astray. The ears would later be buried with the skin away from the body, contaminating only the soil around it, with the rest of the world to be saved.
Except for the undergarment, the clothing had all been removed, and on this one just like on the first one, he could see the network of vein-like scars imprinted over the man’s brown back, a map with trails, lines, and passageways not really leading anywhere should a person decide to follow but telling a tale of travels just the same. To the touch, he could feel it even if he closed his eyes, raised unlike any map he could pick up from the counter at the general store, but no more or less of a map. Certain trails could have been named on this one—the biggest and oldest one after the Kings. He had heard that they didn’t spare whippings over there, and he knew this man had been there for a while. A second smaller trail could have been named after the Thomas family, and the clearing off to the side, after the Randolphs. They were maps, roots that led to families, growing, spreading, and sprouting, a part of the men’s lives. But they would now be taken away and a more beautiful view exposed and left for the world, a view that would show them all, a view they would come to see.
He drew a line from the base of the neck, at the point where the man had first met the knife, down to the buttocks and then started skinning on the right side of the neck, slicing through as if he were working a pig or a cow. If he cut too deep, the blood would stir like a hornet’s nest, rising up and circling around the knife and swarming around the cut skin. He could almost hear the buzzing as he sopped it up with one of the socks he had brought, unbeknownst to him just like Doc Bennett, with a tease of cloth that would later be thrown away because washing wasn’t enough.
The skin on the back was much easier than some of the other parts, like the legs which seemed to fight and argue with him along every inch, and the calves, which if big, slowed him down also. If he wasn’t careful, the knife would lodge in the bone as he cut along the shins resulting in more time with the rock to sharpen his knife and sharpen his focus.
The names of these muscles, bones, and body parts were foreign to him, and the names meant nothing to him as long as his own fetched all sorts of things when he called on them. If he expected them to walk, they should walk. If he expected them to lift, then they should lift. It wasn’t always easy. Even his body had not always obliged. But he hoped that the parts that had would continue to do so for a long time and with ease of sermon too.
These men, the first two and now this third that he had killed, their body parts had fetched when their owners called. He had seen that, them walking about, picking, waving, and bending. But now they would fetch no more. He had made certain of that.
After the back was done and the pink striations showed like painted stripes in the faint moonlight, he turned the man over. They were always big men and required much pushing and shoving and such. Grunts here and there added to the efforts while the smallest animals in the woods took notice to leave. They whispered among themselves hoping to escape, hoping to flee the massacred rather than serve as witnesses in fear of Judgment Day, knowing that what they had seen was wrong and all they had done was run away.
The chest was hairy but it made no difference to him. He started the front like he did the back, a cut from the neck down the torso, stopping just where the undergarment now lay indifferent to the state of things. And again he slid the knife underneath the skin removing it up to the armpits on both sides. He then finessed the shoulders and all around the arms, making his way down to the wrists. He had lots of skin gathered up now and proceeded to the legs, that which he found the hardest, so hard that when it was done, he took a break to gather his rock again and make that scraping sound.
The face should have been harder since he always knew it. It was not the face of a stranger but of a person from his own land, someone who had trusted him, someone who would never have thought that he’d be the one to cut through them and their families, what little of it they had. It made no matter to him though, known or not known, friend or stranger, and when they had not suspected, he used it against them, leading them down the path into the woods from which they would not return. Now, he almost smiled each time as he trimmed the cheeks, forehead, and chin, taking his time to leave no mistakes of haste. He had heard that the Iroquois had skinned the heads of men, a slice of wicked pleasure, sometimes taken for vengeance and sometimes taken for justice. His cuts had not been this way and would not be. His cuts would make the brown men more beautiful, just as the voice told him they would.
He used the garments to wipe away the blood, the pieces of skin, and the tangles of hair and bone that sometimes built up on the side of the knife. By the time he finished, he had soiled the garments considerably, no worse though than those occasions when the men, their muscles limp from the loss of control they once held, soiled their undergarments as their last live act, the excrement unnoticeable to him as he did his work.
The mess about him was minimal, and when it wasn’t he wiped himself down using his own spit as he had seen so many animals do, licking on themselves, their mates, and their young. When he was satisfied, he took the garments with him to bury them away from the body, he and the thing that was with him.
He walked through the woods after he was done, unhampered by the stinginess of the moon’s light since he knew the lay, the ups, the downs, the turns, the dips, and the plains. He knew the marsh areas and the fields and let them lead him to the river bank of the Tar. It was still a time when the ground would play nice, and the air would not steal away his warmth and his breath. But in a few more months, a cold day would come and wrap around him a blanket he wouldn’t want to wear. Today, though, was not that day, and for that he was thankful.
He found a spot near a tree close to the waist of the river and took the over-sized spoon from his pocket. The ears, with pieces of gristle hanging loosely, he held wrapped in a sock. The remainder, the garments, he stowed in a sack. The scooping took a bit of time, but he had plenty of it. Daylight would not visit for many hours, and there was no one who would come looking for him until then. The sandy soil, light because of its proximity to the water, would catch flight sometimes, and he would stop to brush off his head leaning forward to keep the dirt out of his eyes. Dribbles of it caught under his haggard nails and gathered on his pants from his knees to his ankles. Even his boots were served with a light misting.
When the hole was deep enough, he pressed the sack into the ground and covered it back up, watching more dirt take flight. He ran his hands over the top of the grave, his fingers pressing lightly as if not to disturb the dead or the undead, and when he was done he stood over it, looking down until the muscles in his shoulders and neck reminded him of all the work he had done.
Somewhere in his head, he heard himself begging his right foot to move forward, but it hesitated to step directly on the mound he had just made. When it finally rose, off to the side it went, in avoidance as if it, too, had heard and feared the strange superstitions about walking on the graves of the dead. He stood now with his legs too far apart, awkward and wobbly, in a position that might have called forth the urge to drop his pants had he not done so before he left. Should someone come along now and see him from a distance, standing there in that position, like a tired scarecrow, he was sure he would not be thought of as the slave killer.
He brought his legs together, swinging the left foot somewhat behind the right one and then, facing the mound, he took one step back and then another until he was finally able to turn around and walk away. Posters tacked to trees near the farm and stomped onto the ground where they had fallen, soiled with dirt, leaves, and trash after they had given up their fight with the wind and the rain, kept him company as he made his way back down the familiar path. The posters omitted the gruesome details of the killings. We musn’t scare our women, someone had said. But in letters large enough to be seen ten feet away, the words, WANTED, SLAVE KILLER, haunted all those who could read it, men and women alike.
Slave Killer. That was one of the names they called him, the one he’d heard most often. Skin Collector, The Walker in the Woods, and Randolph’s Devil were some of the others. But Slave Killer was the one that stuck with him. It was the one he thought was the most fitting of those he had heard. But if he had to make up his own, if someone had asked him what they should call him, what they should put on the posters hanging from the trees like leaves made for hanging elsewhere, a different name would have come to mind. You can call me The Gardener.
On the poster, he’d want to see flowers growing, in all the colors God had made. He’d want trees behind them, in the greenest green that would ever be seen. A watering can nearby, and a sun, up in the sky to make them grow. He’d tell them to write on the poster, WANTED, THE GARDENER. And those things, he knew, would be enough.
He stepped on one of the posters and crushed the middle of the paper into the earth, leaving behind an outline with his boot of a man half there and half not there. If the moon had been brighter, he would have seen what it was, the calling for others to hunt him down. But instead, the dim moon hid the posters which hung along the path, some barely holding on, waving in the wind as he went by.
He passed two kinds of posters on the trees and on the ground. The first was for a runaway slave answering to the name of Jonas, his first name, and sometimes Bailey, his middle name, or Jonas Bailey, even. The second was for the killer of the slaves, Jonas Bailey and Tomas. It said nothing of them being runaways. The Gardener stepped on the second kind and kept walking. It was now part of the earth, buried, whether it wanted to be or not, just like the first two men were and just like the third now was.
Chapter One
Martha Randolph looked at her husband with his bony hands and long knobby fingers handling the reins of the horse-drawn wagon. The bones looked as if they would pop right through his skin at any moment, take over and lead the horse to the place they wanted to go. If his fingers hadn’t been attached to him, she was certain they would have made money with one of those traveling groups. But they were, and the feel of them around her more than made up for their appearance.
Mister Randolph was sixty, and as Martha looked at his face, she could see that it bore the evidence of the youth that had started its mutiny decades ago. The loss should have seemed like such a small thing. But here he was sitting beside her, wearing a skin that showed every day he had lived plus some, and there was his young slave riding in the back, dead and missing the taut skin that should have been around to protect him. She could recall the many occasions during their marriage when he would point to the most pronounced line not far below his hairline, one inch from his widow’s peak. It resembled a scar from a distance but was actually a large fold of meaty skin that extended from one brow to the other. He told her it came with his first slave purchase from Mr. Wilson’s Slave Auction House. When Mr. Wilson paraded the stock for them all to view, he held his hand high and purchased ten slaves and one quarter pound of meat, raw, in a line across his forehead.
Martha looked at his face now, still pink but less fleshy than in the early days of their marriage. From his hairline down to his chin, the whole of it, she thought, had aged even more at the sight of the third slave with the missing hide, and that one pronounced line, to which he had often referred, was not so meaty now. It hung down ready to drip right off his hollow face. If she wanted to, when he told the tale again, she could say something back to him. She could say he had been swindled, that the meat he thought he purchased with those slaves was nothing more than a piece of his own hide, already skinned and reduced to worry, responsibility, and consequences. She could say there was no meat at all, and he would understand what she meant.
She turned away from him, her eyes back to the path before them. But her eyes would not let her forget what she had seen. Mister Randolph looked all of or maybe even more than seventy to her now, and it had happened in a matter of minutes.
For the burial of the first two slaves, they summoned Reverend Charles to the farm, and both times the preacher brought his cross with him, holding it in his left hand and the Bible in his right. For Martha, it had only taken that first visit for her to reach for her own cross, her hands clutching and wrapping around nothing. And now as they continued down the path, she repeated the gesture, slowly moving her hand to her invisible necklace, one that would have held a cross on it had it existed.
The small amulet would have swung from side to side and maybe forward and back, bouncing against her body as the wheels of the wagon took their vengeance on every rut in the path they crossed. Her hand would have held it tight not wanting to lose it, while her fingers tried to caress its underside. She didn’t have an exact picture of her own in her head but she had seen the one Reverend Charles held in his hand at the burial and on those Sundays they attended church. She had eyed the cross, surveyed every straight edge, every scroll, and every color it made as the light touched it through the clouds, the trees, and the shadows coming in through the windows. She was sure Mister Randolph would summon the preacher again for the burial of this third slave as soon as they got back, and then she would get to see the cross again.
A noise behind Martha pulled her from her trance and back to her place in the wagon. She kept trying to forget about the body behind her, but every time her mind escaped, the body sent out a lasso, its naked hands roping her thoughts, catching them in midair, yanking them back. The body tipped over, as if the dead man had changed his mind about sleeping on his side and decided to roll over onto his back, right in the wagon in which she was riding. It bounced, too. She knew because she heard the thump it made, and it was such a thump, that for a moment she waited for a cry of pain to follow, almost forgetting that the man was dead. Mister Randolph never moved, never said a word about any of it. But Martha turned around, straining and twisting her back to get just a glimpse, confirmation that the slave was indeed still lying there and only lying there, not sitting up, resurrected, ready to remove his wrappings to replace his missing skin with hers.
Before today, riding in the wagon meant recalling memories of trips to town, to church, or to other farms. But from now on it would be different no matter how hard she tried to make it like it was before. Just last month, she and Mister Randolph rode in the wagon together the same as they were doing now, side by side, the warmth of his leg touching hers, enough to keep her company because he never spoke a single word all the way there. They had gone to the general store, and once there, they saw a long line of people waiting to buy things that the store owner no longer had to sell. Mister Randolph and Martha had gotten other things instead, stocked up with as much as they could, not knowing what staples Lincoln’s war would affect next, just trying to prepare for a future they weren’t even certain they would be around to see.
When they were done, sacks and packages lay scattered on top of each other, so much so that the wooden bottom of the wagon disappeared amongst it all. Martha worried that they had filled it too high, that some of what they carried would fall to the path instead of making its way home with them. She kept turning around like she was doing now for the body, head over shoulder, almost too far, checking and looking, while her husband’s eyes stayed the course, never to the side, never to the back, always forward.
Up close, the wagon smelled of tobacco, a sweet stench that harbored the sweat of many men dripping and dropping onto it. Martha could only hope that tobacco would be all that she would smell after today, after the wagon had carried another body of another dead slave. She put her hand down on the wagon’s rail to steady herself as she looked back one more time, turning her body such that it creaked and popped along the middle of her spine. The wagon would never be the same to her now. Instead, it would be a traveling crucifix upon which the slave lay, with his crime unknown to her, his punishment incomprehensible, and his death now riding home with them.
Martha turned her head back to the path, resolving to only look forward, to follow her husband’s lead. She wasn’t sure why she had insisted on coming along to look for this particular slave. He had not meant anything more to her than the first two, and most certainly, as her sister Beryl reminded her as she readied to leave, there was much work for her to do on the farm. But Martha had felt a pull, something attached to her still unseen, like the cross she caressed. It was shackled to her, locked, its key abandoned. She was stuck with it, and it was stuck with her. She didn’t feel any particular way about it, just an undeniable urge to go with them when they gathered together for the search. It reminded her of how much she had wanted to push when she carried her boys. Wait, not yet. She kept hearing the words in between, on top of, and beneath her own grunts and moans. But this time, no one said wait. No one said, not yet. And even if they had, she was not so sure that she could have waited, that she could have stayed behind. Martha had started to say something back to Beryl as she sat down in the wagon to leave, but then changed her mind. The work on the farm would be there upon her return.
Franklin and Theodore, the older and younger sons, followed behind Martha and Mister Randolph in a second wagon with the slaves Beezer and Elbert sitting in the back, their feet and legs so intertwined they could have played child games with each other. Franklin and Theodore were younger replicas of Mister Randolph. Their parentage, he could never deny. The shapes of their heads, the pronouncements of their shoulders, the colors of their eyes, and the mannerisms that spoke when they chose not to, all belonged to Mister Randolph first. He had simply passed those characteristics along as if they were second helpings at his table, enough to go around for any son or daughter he should have.
Franklin and Theodore were both married, and they had sons of their own, not replicas like they were but spitting evidence of certain looks hopping, skipping, and jumping over and around a generation. These grandsons, Will and Joshua, both looked more like masculine imitations of their respective mothers, the maleness of them having been a scrappy lean-to that had already fallen over and left the femaleness standing all alone.
Martha had not wanted to leave the body for her grandsons to wander upon and had her husband send Franklin and Theodore out looking for the missing slave, Horace, with the thinking that he was most likely dead. Martha had stayed with the grandsons and the wagon and the horses out on the path, at least for a while. She watched the men poke the ground with their boots, making their way to the place, until they got smaller and smaller and then, just before they disappeared, she told the grandsons to stay, the eldest to watch the youngest and left the path to follow the men.
Franklin had been the one to find Horace’s body, and when he brought the rest of the men to the spot, Martha watched as they all stood side by side while the small animals ran away from the feast they had found. Even with the skin missing, she could see that pieces of the flesh had been nibbled on in some spots and simply torn off in others. The toes looked like little nubs sprouting from feet. They didn’t resemble anything that might be used for walking. The fingers were the same, nothing much there to use for eating. Around the slave’s middle, bugs and worms whose names were known only to God crawled and slithered, disappearing into the body and then making an appearance again, moving the innards around and causing the slave to appear alive. From the way the dirt had been moved, it seemed as if a large animal might have been pulling on the right arm, trying to take dinner to a more inconspicuous place where it could eat alone.
As Martha watched them take it all in, something moved from underneath the slave’s backside on the right nearest where the men had stopped. Pine needles and leaves were cupped around it, and all that could be seen was a mix of brown and black until the thing with its long furry tail ran out, jumped over the body and was there no more.
Martha stood behind a tree whose arms were almost naked. She listened and watched as Mister Randolph kept his instructions simple.
“Haul him back to the wagon”—no introduction or niceties to help transition the two slaves standing between him and his sons from their usual hauling of live crops to the hauling of a dead man. Beezer and Elbert, picked because they were strong, picked because they did what they were told, but mostly picked because the Randolph sons thought they were least likely to be sickened by the sight, took to wrapping the body in sack cloth to haul back to the wagon.
The slave lay away from the path far back in the woods, in an area overgrown like woods grow, with trees above and plants below often running into each other. Martha watched as Beezer, the oldest, went right to covering the body—first by sliding it over onto the sack cloth, then by bringing the rest of the sack cloth over to cover the front of the slave. His gloves provided some protection against the yellowing flesh, so that he didn’t have to feel it against his own and hope that he’d be able to forget what the feeling was like, Martha hoped. Still, as she saw, it took him a while to perform these tricks. Animals had torn away the undergarment leaving her to see what had made the slave a man and with the hardness of death having set in, the slave’s body might as well have been nailed into the ground.
Elbert handled the end of the body down near the feet, trying to make certain that everything there was covered and would stay covered. Beezer handled the rest. When one of the arms fell out of the wrapping, Beezer took the dead hand into his own, put it back next to the body, and hugged them together with the cloth. Both of them took a piece of the rope the Randolphs had brought along. Beezer used it around the neck and Elbert around the ankles. When it appeared that they were done with the wrapping, Elbert brought his arms to cover his face. But Martha could see his features squirming underneath, trying not to cry, trying not to scream.
The two men stood, rising from their squatted positions, knees and leaves both cracking with Martha watching it all. She saw the body, the things from a distance crawling around on the stomach, making it look as if the skinned slave was still alive. She saw the red that should have been brown, the open eyes, and the masculinity that should have been hidden. And finally, when the men’s heads reached up to the sky, Martha’s hand moved to cover her mouth but it was too late. They lifted the body and hoisted it into the air so that it rested on their shoulders as they started to walk away. A piece of meat slipped out of the cloth and waved to her in rhythm with the pace of their feet. Martha bent over, the gurgling, coughing sounds fighting to get out of her throat. Everything she had for breakfast soiled the bottom of her apron and the front of her shoes. The aroma which had been appetizing that morning only served to make her convulse even more.
“Martha,” Mister called as he made his way to her, pushing and pulling on branches that blocked his way. She couldn’t respond with words, at least not with any that were comprehensible. Remnants of what had just come up lingered on her tongue, at the back of her throat, and in between her teeth, memories she would rather have forgotten. Franklin and Theodore moved faster and caught her just as she fell to the ground out of the way of the mess she had made. They lifted her up and walked alongside of her, holding her and helping her take each step. The three of them led the way back to the path, followed next by Mister Randolph, and then by the two slaves carrying the dead man.
When they reached the wagon, it was thirty minutes before Martha was comfortable with sitting up on her own and another thirty minutes before they could leave. She discarded the much-needed apron, throwing it into the back of the wagon with the body. Then they started on their way back to the farm. All along the path she searched, looking around the tree trunks, broken branches, and the trampled ground for what she wasn’t so sure she wanted to find. It was the one thing she had not heard anyone in the house mention but she had heard the slaves whisper of often—what had become of the skin.
By the time they met the final turn to the house, the droppings on her shoes had dried. They were home now, even if home could not yet be seen. The house sat so far back on the property, they were used to rarely having visitors, other than those who knew them. But when they did come, the fields lingered along both sides of the approach with stalks greeting and waving to friends, family, and strangers making their way to the Randolph homestead. Where they were now, the crops ran right up to the path, one meeting the other, unencumbered by a fence or trees or shrubs. Over the years, Mister Randolph had lost a few slaves who had taken advantage of this failing; they walked from the crops to the path and never turned back.
The men and boys, Martha, and the dead slave, made their way marching almost, in a solemn procession back to the house along that same path, with the wagon carrying Horace leading the way and the dozens of eyes in the fields following them up to the house, measuring the significance of the moment again.
* * * * *
Back in the woods, in that spot from where they removed the third slave’s body, Martha’s spray left its mark on the ground, on roots of trees piercing the soil, and on the leaves of small plants fighting for whatever sunlight they could get underneath the canopy that swayed above them. It smelled of nothing that anyone would have wanted to eat and yet it had come up from Martha’s stomach, summoned by fear as a witch might summon it, unable to say no or disobey.
Something that might once have resembled nostrils hovered above the painted ground, soaking in the stench, inhaling it with such vigor that a trail of the odor could be seen leaving the ground and heading into the incomplete expectation of flesh that extended from the part of the face between the eyes and the mouth, the part where the nose should have been.
It wasn’t there and was there at the same time, that which lingered over the droppings. It held on to a piece of the world just like every other person and every other thing, doing its work and carrying out its purpose. For anyone watching now, there could be no reasoning in the actions taking place, but when it finished taking all that it could, the ground was clean, as were the roots, and as were the leaves. There was nothing left of what Martha had done. All of the dead that had been there earlier was now gone.
Chapter Two
At the fork along the road, at the turn some called it, just before the house came into view, Ethel watched as Mister Randolph and Miss Martha led the band of body searchers back from their hunt for the third slave. The grandsons continued to the house where they would play killing games, each one more gruesome than the last as they attempted to best each other and win some small worthless trinket one of them had found on the ground. Ethel knew about the games because she heard them behind the house in the evenings just as the dark sky was setting in. They came up with rules for winning and losing that left her mind aching. These boys would one day grow into men.
Ethel watched as Miss Martha took a balled up something from the back of the wagon and went into the house, her feet pounding into the ground almost vowing to never come back out. Mister Randolph, standing with his face in Ethel’s direction, spoke to the sons with his hands and arms more so than his mouth. He pointed, flailed, waved, and patted, and then when he was finished, he followed the same path as his wife. Mister Randolph was not the type of man to point, flail, and wave. To Ethel, he looked to be having some sort of fit, and she half expected one of the sons to run, pointing, flailing and waving himself, all the way to Doc Bennett’s.
As the door closed behind the elder Randolph, one of the sons did take to the road, Theodore. Ethel suspected he was fetching the preacher. He would come and deliver the Lord’s words “in the hope that the slave’s soul would be saved even if his skin had not been.” The words she remembered, because he had said them twice already.
Franklin took a detour to the right of the house, leading Mister Randolph’s wagon to the slave’s burial site, a place at the back of the farm where the land was a barren woman. Once there, she watched him talk to Randall, hand him a shovel from the wagon, and then go on his way.
Until she heard the approaching wagons, Ethel had been walking up and down the same row, pulling small and then even smaller weeds, getting the ground ready for whatever the Randolphs might be able to plant in the spring and trying to look like she was working. Amidst her attempts, she noticed some of the slaves near her. They seemed to be doing the same, pulling at weeds and trying to look like they, too, were getting past the worry. Looking around and then back to work. Looking around some more, and then back to work some more. It was getting harder and harder for any of them to act as if nothing was wrong. If things didn’t change, come next summer fear would be the only thing the Randolphs would have coming out of the fields.
Ethel made her way over to the next row and continued the ritual of yanking and looking until one of the grandsons ran over, yelling that they were done for the day. It was the oldest one, the one who used to run with her son a lot more when they were younger. He called to them using a voice that mocked his own father and uncle and grandfather even, a voice that spoke in that same learned tongue, that same learned language. She remembered what he was like just two years ago. It didn’t take long to spoil the good fruits that God had put on this earth, she told herself.
Ethel straightened her back, listened to it creak with pleasure and instead of going home, took the same path that Franklin had taken. It led to a spot that couldn’t be seen from the front of the house. Like the farm itself, visitors had to know where to look in order to find the soft earth holding on to the bodies of the dead Randolph slaves. Randall was still digging the grave for the third slave when she got there, and for a while she kept him company, just as Martha had kept Mister Randolph company as he drove the wagon back to the farm. No questions, comments, or conversation between them, just the two of them sharing a piece of silence for a time, like they might have done with a jug of water on a blistered July day.
Under a piece of shade leaning over the barren spot, Ethel watched as Randall struggled with the shovel—the dirt fighting him and him fighting back while he twisted the tool, stepped on the top of it, and used the weight of his body to lean over the handle with his chest. He pushed it down four inches or so until it popped out of the ground and threw a shovel’s worth of dirt onto Ethel’s shoes. She watched him until she tired of standing and then took a seat on a nearby rock to watch some more.
After another ten minutes of fighting passed, Franklin returned to the burial spot, leaving with them Elbert, Beezer, and two more shovels for twisting and digging. Ethel stared as Randall staked his shovel into the ground and sat down in front of it to watch the two men. The small portion of the scooped metal back still above the ground was too small for Randall’s rear, and so it spilled over both sides of the shovel when he leaned back against it. Ethel wondered how long it would agree to act as his chair.
This was not the first grave Randall had opened for the skinned slaves. He dug the first two graves also. Ethel knew because she had watched him both times, fighting with the same kind of earth, just in a different spot. No other men had been around then to keep him company when it might have been enough, and now that he had company she realized he needed something more. One slave killing was rather strange, but three—he could hardly talk about it to her, and when he did, Randall tried to make it sound like he wasn’t bothered, like there wasn’t much to any of this slave killing thing that was going on. Only, it didn’t really work. It was the way his breath seemed to give way, Ethel noticed.
Randall was one of the oldest slaves at the Randolph farm, an old timer, but not necessarily the slave living the longest with the Randolphs. At sixty years old or so, nothing much had failed him yet, not his eyesight, his hearing, or his thinking. The gray on his head had long ago starting keeping company with the dark brown curls that sat around the edge of his face, making his face look all lit up, a halo turned on edge, Ethel had once heard someone say. His cheeks were marked with black spots, moles they called them, growing on top of moles, mixed here and there with wrinkles, all of them wrestling for space. A big dimple cut through the middle of his chin, and underneath it he wore an old bandana that he used to wipe his forehead throughout the day. At the edges, the strings had started unraveling, peeling away one by one. Its original color hid beneath a rainbow of stains that neither Ethel nor anyone else could guess the source of. He found it on the ground one day when he was in town with one of Mister Randolph’s sons, tossed aside or maybe lost. It didn’t matter. He had found it, and it was his, he told Ethel. She never saw him without it.
Ethel rose from her sitting post and approached the hole for a better view. Three weeks ago, it was all different, she remembered. Slaves who went missing turned up most of the time, after they got lost, got hungry, or got wise. They were sometimes a little beaten and a little bruised after one of the patterollers got a hold of them. But the skin was still there. It wasn’t missing from head to toe, Ethel thought as she looked into the hole and shook her head to tell Randall’s replacements that the hole still wasn’t big enough.
The day Randall told the men about the body of the first slave, Jonas Bailey, they looked at his face frowning, trying to see if the devil was pulling his lips, making him say those ugly things. But there wasn’t a devil anywhere around and so the men had no choice but to believe him, to believe that what Randall was saying about the body of Jonas Bailey was true. At first he rambled, but then he let it all out like it was nothing, just an ordinary nothing, like talking about a woman or talking about needing more rain. Randall had overheard Miss Martha and Miss Beryl when he was fixing the porch—the President Lincoln was freeing the slaves, and Jonas Bailey had been found dead in the woods down near the Tar, his skin peeled right off his body.
Randall had left nothing out about what Jonas Bailey looked like before he went into the ground. He knew because he had peeled back the covering to view the body after he finished digging the grave. Mister Randolph or maybe one of the sons had left Randall alone with the body, and he had taken it upon himself to see what the hush and hurry was about. That night when just about everyone had gone down except a few, Randall shared more with some of the men, things he dared not mention around women.
The men Randall told, then told other men, and those men told a few more. The smell of bad meat. The way the fingernails and toenails looked too long. How the eyes had sunken into the head, pulled back into it maybe by some person or some thing, hiding behind its back. The sounds he thought he heard even though it was just him and the dead man. There were more details shared that Randall never spoke of, tellings and stories that just popped out of other people’s heads and daydreams as they made their way around. All these bits and pieces and parts and wholes visited across the farm and through the town. The preacher, Reverend Charles, told the Randolphs when he saw them in town that he would pray for them something special. Mr. Beale, the owner of the general store spoke of it to his customers while he took their money and bagged some of what they had come to buy. Mr. Mitchell, the former schoolhouse teacher started writing a book about it. The children, slaved and freed, made up various rhymes and games and chants, none of which pleased the adults, slaved or freed. And when the winding through the farm and up to the town and back out to the farm was done, the women were not spared anything even though Randall had tried.
Denny, Ethel’s brother, was in the group of men that sat with Randall that night, some of them on the ground, some standing, leaning on a tree or whatever they could find, their ears disgusted by what they heard, their feet unable to lead them away. They couldn’t move, Ethel remembered Denny saying when she had him to herself the next day. It might not have been the best thing, hearing it at night, he had also told her.
“How we supposed to go to sleep after that? How we supposed to want to stay awake?”
For Ethel, it was too much. She wanted to know and not know at the same time, just like the men.
“Tell me. What he said about it. The body, I mean.” And Denny did. He shared all of the same that Randall had shared with him and the other men.
As she stood with Randall, Elbert, and Beezer over the hole that shouldn’t have been there, she wondered if they were scared one of them might be next. She also wondered if she should be scared for herself. The fear, it kept coming to her and then leaving. It pestered her, a fly that buzzed around her head and wouldn’t leave her alone, especially since she had a son to worry about. Sometimes death ain’t too picky, she thought.
Ethel walked closer to the hole. Her right foot slipped on the edge and almost led her into the grave before Beezer grabbed her shoulder with one hand and her waist with the other. He had taken a liking to her, and every chance he got, he reminded her. But she didn’t care for him like that. Never would. He pulled her back so that she brushed up against his chest, and she stepped on his right foot as she tried to steady herself. Ethel didn’t think Beezer noticed.
At thirty years, she was a large woman, not too much size on her, but a pleasure for any man to look at. God had been kind to her, Ethel once heard a voice say in the field when she had removed her over shirt, revealing forearms which hinted at the kind of legs that carried her. She looked at her skin, her hands callused in places, with the knuckles poking through wanting to be flowers when the truth of the world knew them to be only weeds. Her face told strangers of her place on the farm, a field worker with nary a minute spent inside cleaning or preparing meals or perhaps even nursing. But she didn’t begrudge her skin or apologize for it; it had its own life, away from her sometimes, mending to itself and taking care of her when she thought nothing of it.
When Ethel tired of watching the digging and had the notion to return to her cabin, she nodded to them all and turned to leave them with the rest of their work. She had no wish to watch all that would take place, the body and its wrappings being placed into the wood box, the box being placed in the ground, and the sound of the dirt hitting it with sprinkling thuds. A vision of it was already in her head. There was no reason to stay and sew it into her memories.
As she turned, she saw the mute boy standing next to Beezer, looking at the hole for Horace that she had almost fallen into. Cleaster had often played with the older Randolph grandson, but all that was coming to an end as he grew older, and the Randolphs realized that mute did not mean invalid. Ethel had thought that the boys were together until she remembered the grandson yelling at them in the fields earlier. At some point in time, she didn’t know when, the mute boy had joined her at the grave site. She had not heard him approach.
Cleaster stood behind her, upright except that his head was cocked to one side almost touching his shoulder, and his eyes seemed to pierce the open ground, stabbing at it. At first she wasn’t sure why he was so interested in the hole. Then she realized it was not the hole that had captured his attention. Cleaster had no voice but he did have a vision, and every now and then she caught him trapped in it. With talking folks, they get quiet, don’t say much of anything. But Cleaster had been quiet for years now. With him, it was always about his eyes. That’s how she could tell, and right then she could see that something was bothering him. She knew it wasn’t so much the hole, the dead men, and the stories that had come along with them. It was something else, something that gave him a different look, the look he wore after she told him of his father and what had happened to him. For Cleaster, it always came back to his father.
“Cleaster, ain’t nothing here for you,” Ethel told her son as she walked away from the men without a single goodbye. The mute boy hesitated to follow, his trance still holding him, refusing to let go just as Ethel’s trance had refused to let her go just moments before.
Randall walked over to him and touched him on the shoulder, just as Beezer had touched Ethel.
“She’s right. You go on now.”
Cleaster looked from the hole, to Randall, and then to his mother who had kept walking and was now more than a few steps away from him. With the trance broken, he followed her, glancing back at the men and the hole every few steps until they were out of sight. Ethel looked back once, but only at Cleaster. His face was barely an outline of a person, a darker version of herself, a shadow that walked and played among them, almost there.
Ethel couldn’t remember the exact day when Cleaster started asking about his father but once he started, he didn’t stop. He would ask before she went out into the fields and when she was done. But mostly he would ask before he went to sleep. Plenty of slaves there on the farm didn’t have family with them, and Cleaster was no different. He saw and knew others without mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers and understood even if he didn’t accept it. This was the world he lived in, but for him it was not enough to know of his world. He wanted to know of his father.
Three years ago toward the end of summer, Cleaster spent one day in particular tormenting his mother with his begging, telling her that he ought to know what had happened to his father. By the time the sun had finished its work up in the sky and she had finished her work in the fields, Ethel had tired of his pleading and explained it all to him, at least all of what she knew. They sat down at the table, and she told what had sounded at first like a story for children, all the pretty words that omitted the ugliness of the world they lived in, a story of their love, and them loving him before he was even here. For a while, Ethel could see Cleaster hated her and the soft story she was telling him, the way she seemed to be leaving out the hard parts, the hard truths of why his father was no longer part of their world. He had wanted her to be honest, and instead, she left him feeling sick and tricked. When Ethel finally got around to telling him that she thought his father was dead but that she wasn’t sure, when it seemed she either couldn’t or wouldn’t give any real details of his father’s leaving, Cleaster got up from his chair and walked out the door in disgust. She didn’t hear him when he came back in. All she knew was that when Cleaster woke up the next morning, his head looked bigger than it had been the evening before. It was as if it had ingested the world and it now bulged beneath his skull in perfect roundness riding on top of his shoulder, harnessed by straps she couldn’t see. It was that day that Cleaster, the son of Ethel and the absent Abraham, stopped talking.
* * * * *
Mister Randolph gave them one hour to bury Horace, from one in the afternoon to two, and asked Reverend Charles to speak again. But none of this was what he wanted to do. It was all Miss Martha’s doing. He had simply given in to her request.
As the slaves gathered near the mound of dirt, Mister reminded them that it was not his kindness that had offered them this opportunity and that they should not misplace any understanding of their circumstance. His comment that “this horrible deed has not changed anything,” confused not just the slaves but also Reverend Charles who stood holding his Bible so tightly he must have thought it was going to fly away. They let him talk his talk, the order of things somewhat reversed, and when he was done, the burial for the third slave began.
It started at one and was over by one fifteen. Reverend Charles had only needed two minutes to say what a white man could and would about a slave, with the Randolph household watching from afar but close enough to hear. At the preacher’s Amen, Randall started the singing first. Who was second and who was third to join was hard to tell.
Carry my bones
yonder,
to the healing place.
My soul long ago run off,
scared away by the temptress of life.
Carry my heart
to another,
man or woman.
It matters not.
Carry my seed
in the wind
to flourish upon the ground
rising up to maturity.
Carry my mind
so that peace may come
and the wars be distilled away.
Carry me far. Carry me home.
Carry me stocked. Carry me alone.
Carry me once. Carry me all.
Carried by faith upon every fall
Carry me home.
Come hither sayeth the Lord.
Ethel stood between her brother, Denny, and her mute son, and was one of the first to walk away when breath for the song had run out. For days the slaves waited to see if the skin would show up at the Randolph homestead in some manner just as they had waited before. When they worked in the fields, they would turn over a barrel or bucket with a bit of apprehensiveness about what might be underneath, lifting it just enough so they could get a peek first, and then, after finding nothing, letting out what had become a common sigh, the air they had been holding back with a grip that left it bleeding. A walk to the barn to fetch what should have been any old thing brought with it caution and concern, and even in the fields, many a slave looked up at the last minute to catch himself or herself just before walking into another person or thing because their eyes had been locked to the ground ready to issue a warning to their feet just in case the skin had been thrust there.