My Monticello(46)

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After supper, I was scheduled for duty down at the welcome pavilion. That was the night I came across yet another stranger, at the edge of our woods. I was on guard with Knox and Edward Flores, who had the same firm but gentle demeanor as his father. As always, we took shifts, with one of us waiting near the ticket office with a walkie while the others patrolled the perimeter of the parking lot and the woods down to the entrance at the road. On duty, we’d round that humble slave burial ground, the one Mama Yahya had unwittingly led me to. We’d meet back at the ticket office to confirm everything was secure.

While Knox and Edward took their separate rounds, I leaned against a wooden column, my eyes burning. I was so exhausted that my mind kept taking off from one place to another. It flew to MaViolet, who’d gone quiet again, though before my shift, she’d taken a few sips of water. I knew I should be up by her bedside, but I was terrified to hear that long rasp again, and what would I do if I heard it? I’d asked Ms. Edith to sleep there while I was on duty. She’d pursed her lips but said okay.

I had one of Mr. Flores’s shotguns slung across my back, the strap at a slant, cutting my chest in two. Earlier that day, I’d asked the older man to show me how to hold and aim and shoot. The secret, Mr. Flores had said, was in your head and your heart, not in your hands. I’d squinted at a target balanced out past the red-roofed stable, and when I felt a painful kick, my stupor lifted: For a moment, I’d remembered the weight of my body.

My mind flew to Knox, who was patrolling the lot. When he’d volunteered at dinner to go to town, I knew he wanted to protect me, to help me, yet he seemed unable to see me. Or maybe I didn’t want him to. Maybe I was scared to let him see the broken bits, the sharp and jagged pieces. Could he accept those parts too, love them even, given the past we’d inherited, which now felt like future? Could I?

My mind hovered above Devin, looking down on him from a safe distance, his figure walking Mulberry Row, his tawny boots crushing pebbles. Had I imagined him looking at me earlier that day—his small act of kindness? Why did I care so much either way? I pushed Devin out of my head, and there, in his wake, Momma appeared, laid out in a dress the color of lemons, gray-faced and too young for that coffin. Momma, I tried, but my voice broke. I pinched the inside of my arm. It was better this way, I told myself, that she’d been spared this fearful, exiled waiting.

Finally, my thoughts settled on the being inside me, trying to stitch itself into a person—a girl! And was I even eating enough for her? What kind of world would she be born into—a sick, sick world. What kind of mother could I hope to be in a world as broken as this?

Knox came back from his patrol, unwinding from his gun strap and hugging me easily. All’s quiet, he said. Then it was my turn to walk and his to wait.

It was so hot that night, even the chatter of insects felt suppressed. When we’d first arrived, the moon had been full, if hazy, but that night it shone slimly, a sliver glowing white above me. I walked down into the woods and was more than halfway to the road when I saw the stranger, a shadow between the line of trees. He was on our side of the road, facing town; his presentation felt so different than the others who’d come before him, with raised arms and raised voices—those others who were part of us now.

I blinked and saw that he was just a boy, ten or eleven. His flashlight, dim to begin with, flickered and bobbed in his hand. As I watched, he stopped to peer into the rising woods as if he were looking right through me. Our Monticello, I remember thinking. I sank to one knee, my body braced like a buttress, my heart leaping and rearing back. He began to mount the slope between us, coming closer, then halting again. He crouched and that was when I saw something known in his profile. He was using his flashlight, fussing with a knapsack he carried, and the path of his eyes rose up toward the house, and all it held that was precious to me. His gaze slipped back, and that was when he saw me, kneeling in the woods and looking down at him. He was close enough that the light of his flashlight stung my eyes.

The thing was, I knew that boy, I thought I knew him. It was that same boy I’d seen jeering from the pickup window, the one who’d haunted my dreams. I don’t know what my face did when I saw him. I only know what his face did in reaction to mine. His eyes went wide and his mouth fell open. There was a fearful lurching backward and down the slope he’d only just begun to climb. I felt my body in motion too.

I thought I would fly out toward him and shout, Keep going! Instead, my mouth seized, I lost purchase, and sliding, something sharp bit my ankle. A line of fire ran along my hip. The boy seemed desperate in his retreat, but I kept after him, half stumbling until my feet found the reliable flatness of road. After that, I ran in earnest, my sneakers slapping the glittery asphalt, the borrowed rifle knocking at my spine. The boy was fast, but I was faster. I didn’t realize I could be that fast. The distance between us collapsed to nothing. I lunged and caught the flap of his knapsack. He went down hard and howling.

I only meant to hold and shake him. But then his weight was pinned beneath mine, my knees sinking into his narrow chest. My arms raised themselves and I could feel every ounce of my body, as my fists gaveled down on the boy on the road. Who are you! I shouted. Who the fuck do you think you are?

I kept on shouting—it’s a wonder no one heard me—my words a series of frantic notes, almost like a refrain.

The boy’s cries dissolved into a kind of helpless grunting, a sound like recognition, acceptance even. Those lower animal sounds finally brought me back to myself. My hands fell heavily to my sides. I moved off his body, my breath heaving, my whole body alive with tremors. He lay in the road like he might never get up. He looked smaller from that intimate distance, younger, his face dark with blood. But it was that same boy; it had to be.