The Prophets(104)

“Are you hurt? Who hurt you?”

James’s face had begun to contort. He ran around the bed and tripped over Timothy’s legs. He looked down. Timothy was disgraced. No eyes, just like the niggers in his dream.

“Christ Jesus,” he whispered.

He stepped gingerly over Timothy and toward where Ruth lay. He tried to pick her up to carry her to her room and help her clean herself, but each time he got his arms around her, she fought and tried to bite him. He exhaled loudly.

“Ruth. Ain’t nothing we can . . .”

It didn’t matter. This was how she would mourn. It seemed ancient, what she was doing. Older even than his beliefs. Like it might have come with the land itself. So maybe she was in the grasp of something, wasn’t herself because she wasn’t herself. Who was she now, then? He would have to leave her to know, and inside him was something that desperately needed to know.

He flew down the stairs and out to where he had seen Paul. Now there was a group of others who had finally awoken, and what seemed like an endless crowd of niggers being gathered around the fat willow. James ran to the tree where Paul stood. He had dragged the nigger by his hand and held on to it. But the way he held it, like a parent would hold a child’s hand, gave James chills.

“Rope,” Paul said.

Zeke hooted. Malachi danced. Jonathan howled. James told Jonathan and some of the others to help with the animals despite Paul’s command.

“These niggers ain’t godly!” Jonathan shouted into James’s face.

Zeke started to giggle and James yelled, “Quiet!” but Zeke kept giggling.

James walked over to Paul, pointing to the nigger on the ground beside him. “Who is that?”

“Do it matter?” Malachi shot back.

“Paul?” James turned to look at Paul again.

Paul dropped to his knees and began to weep. He let go of the nigger’s hand. James bent down next to him.

“Paul.”

Paul looked at James. In his eyes, James saw his mother not on her deathbed, but in a coach riding away from a magnificent sunrise. She held her hands daintily and smiled at the thought of her son, who was now a man, and she didn’t even judge how he had lost himself because somewhere, perhaps, there was a piece left, but only a mother had the skill to find it. It was she, after all, who had built it. She wasn’t looking at him, no, but she was still smiling and that was enough. There, James and Paul’s relation became real, realer even than it was that first day, when he stumbled, could barely keep his eyelids open, and took all of Paul’s lies for inevitable truth. James whispered something that only Paul could hear, but it wasn’t for Paul. Then Paul said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “String this nigger up. High!”

James blinked, then nodded. He took the listless, dying body from Paul, and he and some of the men noosed then hefted it. All of their rifles lined their backs.

“Be on guard,” James said and some of the men stopped tending to the body and raised their weapons toward the crowd of niggers, some of whom wept, some of whom shook, while a few stood resolute in the face of everything.

Paul began to grab at the weeds, pulling them out of the ground by their roots. He started to shove them into his mouth. Dirt still clumped at the bottom, he pushed weeds into his mouth and began to chew. Crying, moaning, and chewing. It had finally happened, James thought. Something vital had broken. He helped Paul to his feet and whispered to him, “They can’t see you this way.”

Paul just stared wordlessly and, for the first time, James put his arm around his cousin’s shoulder. Briefly, everything was theirs. They looked at each other and it wasn’t an ending, but it was something new. It frightened James, and he could tell from his quivering lip that it had frightened Paul, too.

After he had disassembled his lantern so that he might light his makeshift torch, James heard the buzzing. As he made his way toward the swinging body and set it aflame, the buzzing. All guns were pointed toward the niggers and he knew from his dream that was the first mistake. How many might we get? Twenty? Thirty? What of the other hundred or so? Then he saw the nigger whose name his tongue was forbidden to curl around, and she made her move, and something in him froze.

That was why the mulatto boy was able to catch him by surprise.





Numbers We are the Seven.

Sent to you to watch over.

What is required of you is to look up.

And remember the star.

But memory is not enough.

We told you from the beginning. Perhaps not in the way you might have expected, but we told you.

It would not make much difference to explain to you what happened to us. You already have that answer. It is how you wound up here.

Memory is not enough, but know: Infants cannot be reasoned with, they can only be fed or starved.

To break an incantation, another one of equal or greater power must be evoked.

The cosmos is on your side.

It will be all of you or none of you; this is immutable.

The cure is outside of our knowledge, but that does not mean that there is no cure.

Do not be afraid of the dark.

For that is what you are.





Exodus





1:1


Samuel’s eyes were rolling back in his head, and James had the rope in his hand. He flung it over a branch. The noose dangled. The people—themselves tired, and yet their hearts thumping loud enough to hear—weren’t sure where to look. They kept their eyes downward until they were told to do otherwise. That is, except for Maggie. Maggie’s face was creased. She shifted the weight from her bad hip to her good one, and she crunched the edges of her dress in her hand. In her other hand, the glint of metal.