The Prophets(17)
What for? she thought. ’Cause it lets the things through anyway. ’Cause wood rots. And fences come down. All you need is a bad storm. And ain’t that where they come from to begin with? Ain’t the truth right there in the way they spin and destroy everything that get any kind of close to them? Ain’t they just creek waters God willing to rise?
Essie turned away from the pens and began walking slowly toward the gate. I came here with a pie I didn’t wanna make because Amos is the best I can do. He see me. Don’t you understand?
She turned back to look at Isaiah and Samuel, who hadn’t yet moved from their spots. Amos make a bargain, even if in his own head, that so far hold up and I won’t let that just fall apart and become broodmare again. Where were y’all when I needed some good, huh? In here carrying on, I reckon. Now here I am, carrying my burden in the flesh and Amos tell me I supposed to love it because that what the blood of Jesus demands. Small price to pay, he say. But who paying? He don’t bring that up because he already know the answer.
Solomon looked up at Essie as the tears began to form in her eyes. She wiped them away quickly. She blinked and came back to herself.
“Y’all be good now,” she yelled out as she began to step backward.
Isaiah waved. Samuel stood motionless, transfixed, a humming in the air that seemed to come from both him and not him, which frightened her. She turned and walked toward the gate and stood briefly at its opening. It framed her like a picture and continued to do so until she walked beyond it and headed due north.
Amos
Amos had seen strange things before: living babies retrieved from the taut-faced corpses of their mothers; beat-down men talking out loud to shadows; bodies swinging high from trees. One body in particular was that of a man named Gabriel, a friend of Amos’s father. There wasn’t much he remembered about Gabriel; it was, after all, so long ago. There wasn’t much more Amos remembered about his father, either—except his name, Boy, and his ever-stooping silhouette in the field, sometimes against a red horizon.
But what remained clear about Gabriel was the missing thing: a bloody, discarded clump at the base of the tree. Amos cursed himself even now for mistaking it for rotten fruit, for wanting to claim it for his mother so that she could use it for jam or a pie. To this very day, the thought of what might have happened made him grab himself and wince.
He arrived at Empty full-grown with his head fastened inside something that looked almost like a rusty birdcage because a toubab woman in Virginia said something untrue, and death was too expensive. With no space to fly, the bars sliced his vision to pieces, permitted him to see only in thin slices. A smiling face here, a sobbing one there, but he couldn’t put it all together for the obstacles in between. Coming down off that creaking wagon, shackled to twenty other people, holding up a boy because he made his mother a passing promise. The metal chains roared as they slid from wood to dust, heavy feet stirring up orange clouds that made them all cough as they were rushed onto a patch of land and then, in the morning, out to the cotton field. It all appeared before him in fragments: safe, manageable fragments that made him think that perhaps the birdcage wasn’t so bad after all. It wasn’t good to think about the past because thinking about it could conjure it up. Sometimes, the past was gracious. Loneliness had hands, but it was much more than wanting a steady piece. Piece wasn’t even on his mind when he first saw Essie in the field, crouched and sweating, a scarf holding her hair up like a hill. His gut told him that they should be cleaved together, smile together, endure trials together because that is how they belonged: together. And there was nothing in The Fucking Place that could ever make that untrue. So when Paul chose him out of the nine lined up, Amos knew it was a sign.
Amos sighed. He had seen strange things, so he closed his eyes. The first time Paul demanded Essie, Amos pleaded until he was hoarse, promised unthinkable favors that only managed to make Paul angry. It was only after Paul threatened to whip him that Amos became silent. He didn’t think of that as cowardice, just futility. When Paul finally took Essie and left, Amos choked on her quiet obedience, stumbled over the impasse. He imagined actions that he knew he could never indulge in without great cost, and not just to himself. Breaking Paul’s bones would have been simple, but grinding them into dust for the paste that Amos would smear on his own face for the dance, shaking a staff, and calling out forgotten words to ancestors who he wasn’t exactly sure could hear: that would be the hard part because there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t remain alone.
He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returned—eyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing something—he wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldn’t help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.
“They earlobes always tell their intentions. I don’t know why, they just do,” Amos said as though it mattered. Spoken like a true fool, he let the words trip out, jagged from being dragged over his teeth, thus sharp on Essie’s skin.
“You coulda killed him,” he added after he got no response from her. He had the nerve to say it because it was dark and he couldn’t see her. Essie’s quick inhalation startled him. She must have intended for him to feel the scolding in it. The words he knew she left behind her lips: You coulda, too.