The Prophets(112)
He took a deep breath before he disappeared below the surface. Sound became muffled, bubbles bursting and water rushing into his every space. His eyes were squeezed shut. He opened them and it made no difference. Everything was black and maybe that was a good thing.
He kicked his legs and shot forward. Forward and forward, legs and arms and breath. All of the things that the river seemed to be taking from him, pushing against him as he swam through its flow, but not letting it carry him. Samuel had told him that they would be safe on other shores. Isaiah didn’t know for sure. There was what he was told and what he felt in his core, but he wasn’t sure which could be trusted. He had no way to measure, no sign to read, no mother and no father to correct him because they had already erred and could assure him that all the traps had already been tripped so it was safe to gallivant in that other direction. There was, however, a thing in the center of him that said, Better than where you are. So he swam underneath, almost like he was beneath the world itself, and he wondered if he would ever make it back on top.
He saw something flash in waters too dark to see in. Quick, fleeting things that looked like watchful eyes. He told himself that those were products of his exhaustion. His limbs had weakened, and it didn’t at all matter how many piles of hay and shit he had shoveled that allowed his biceps to swell and caused toubab to think that there wasn’t any load he couldn’t carry. Confused sometimes, he had taken such regard as a measure of his strength: the more he could take, the stronger it made him feel. Then he realized that he, the cow, the horse, and the hogs—even the chickens—served the same purpose.
His head came up and there was the night sky in all of its stardom and finally, before nearly giving up, there was suddenly ground beneath his feet.
He dragged himself on hands and knees across the muddy bank of driftwood and moss. Then he turned over and lay flat on his back, panting into the murky place he was now in. Some of the rocks he lay upon cut into him. He knew that he didn’t have much time. Instinct told him to run, but his legs disobeyed the summoning. He sat up. He tried to avoid looking across the river, back toward what he had escaped. He knew that he wouldn’t hear his dream: Samuel in the river, taking massive strokes, head beneath and then above the water, getting closer and closer until finally reaching dry land and collapsing into his embrace, free.
But he looked anyway and he could see the flames burning in the night and the figures at war. And from so far away, he couldn’t master his eyes enough to search for the shape of the nightness he knew better than his own.
There was no sign of Samuel in the water, but across the river, nearer to the Big House, rocking from the hated tree, head cocked to the side as though curious, lit up like a lantern, there was somebody. He would have been surer of the form before the fire began to ravage it. But who else could it be?
He vomited, and the river wasted no time in lapping up his offering and dragging it off to sea. Isaiah tried to stand, but fell to his knees. He stared at the fire. He imagined he had a part in it, too. Living in the world as designed by toubab had given that gift to him: regret and, with his left hand, pointing a finger at his own chest when there were plenty remaining to point elsewhere. Circling his head was his present: he could have left Timothy’s calls unanswered, recoiled from his touch, refused to remove his britches, and refrained from stroking himself to life. What if he had failed to lean into him, push a laugh loose, gaze too long into his eyes like he might have, by chance, found something there? Worse, he had almost let out a sigh, and there was no doubt that he enjoyed the softness of the bed. Was survival worth this? Was Samuel right to think it treason?
During the betrayal times Isaiah had pushed the thoughts away from him, into the corners of Timothy’s room, behind triple-stacked canvases, where they remained like things you never wanted people to see. He didn’t look into any of the mirrors, which helped. For he knew now that these were cowardly acts as good as any noose. Samuel had told him before that he would have to risk something and stop trading body for comfort. Wounded, Isaiah wanted to tell him to think of cotton to see how some comforts can draw blood.
He had to go. They would be coming for him soon. They would cross the river on a raft or perhaps a small boat. They would bring the hounds and weapons of death whose noises would echo into forever. They would come and try to extract from him all he had to give even though everything he had wasn’t enough to fill a palm. His knowledge no bigger than a stone.
He looked at the stars. Maybe those flashing eyes at the bottom of the river were just a reflection of the sky brought low. That would explain why people drowned, being unable to determine up from down because they looked the same. But there was still the sense that they weren’t just eyes, but they were watching. Stars don’t do that.
Isaiah exhaled. He wondered what he and Samuel could have been, would have been, if they hadn’t come of age in chains. There was no need for tears. Not when the feelings were still fresh and tucked inside his folds, moist and safe beneath the foreskin, accessible by memory and caress. This could only be destroyed if he, too, was destroyed. And even then, the destruction would only serve to bring them closer, hand in hand in that next place, wherever it was, where his parents and theirs found permanent escape from the people whose bodies were covered with nothing. Not Heaven, certainly not that dreadful place. But somewhere else, where the first songs could be sung without interruption.
Swam the whole way underwater, only coming up for gulps of air when his lungs threatened to burst. He saw not stars, he figured, but people down there: faces in the mud, smiling or maybe screaming, hands joined in a circle, feet tapping to the rhythm of the river’s ebb. He recognized them, but didn’t know them.