The Prophets(40)

Her green-green eyes were glazed over with memory so she wasn’t sure if what she saw before her was now or then, but there was a light in the distance, shining downward, from where she couldn’t discern. In the light, there was the silhouette of a man, tall and straight, perhaps with a rifle cast over his shoulder, but unlikely a soldier. There was little need for soldiers now that the land had been captured and the savages that resided in this space before were tamed and would soon be erased by means she was unafraid to articulate. For the rules were different under acts of war. Though women were not permitted to fight in the official declarations of such, official was key for two reasons. First, some women disguised themselves as men, took on the exact visage and manner of men, from the short hair to the aggressive gait, to do what they believed was the patriotic thing. She knew of one such woman who was hanged when discovered, not for the fighting—for she heard that she had fought even better than the men—but for the deception, which they claimed was in more than just her disguise; it was in the way she lived even in times of peace, rejecting “she” for “he,” an affront to Christ.

Second, women endured a more lasting, thus a more brutal combat in merely trying to survive men. Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didn’t matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyes—there, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.

Whenever and wherever nothing encounters something, conflict is inevitable. She wondered if the figure in the light carrying the rifle was, then, coming to start a war with her. She took a step back. She blinked and the figure and the light were gone. Only unyielding blackness was there now and, strangely, it comforted her.

She took slow steps around the perimeter of the Big House until she reached the back and stood in front of her garden. The smells overwhelmed her. Not just heal-all, but also coneflowers and gardenias. She bent down to inhale. She closed her eyes and asked herself why not a bedroom right here, in the middle of the garden, under a tent, of course, but yes, in the springtime this was the place she should lay her head every night. Summer might be too grueling, but spring.

She thought maybe wake Maggie and Essie. She wanted them to smell the garden as it was supposed to be smelled, too. And wouldn’t they want to be awakened? Surely after backbreaking work in the cotton field and in the kitchen, they would appreciate being in the presence of glory, even if for a short time. Ruth touched her throat. Her head rolled back. She leaned against the fence surrounding her garden. She felt faint—or, at least, she wanted to feel faint because that’s what sometimes made her feel like a special woman and separated her from a Maggie or an Essie. A tear dripped from the edge of her eye. She had never before felt so generous. Never before felt it in a way so sustaining. To have wanted to invite Maggie and Essie meant her heart was big no matter what else it was also capable of. How odd to have finally come to that realization now. It must have been the flowers.

She crept through the garden. Her bare feet cracked twigs and frightened crickets into the air. She wondered how she looked there, in the dark. With no light anywhere, could she yet be seen? Did her nightgown, silky white, take on some of the ebon of the night to make it seem to glow in some violet fashion? She looked at her hands and remembered that there was a time when the beginnings of calluses were just about to come into bloom on a surface that should only ever be delicate. But then the man with the rifle flung over his shoulder came walking, even paced, right up out of the horizon to take her away from toil. He had come all the way to South Carolina to get her on the word that was whispered on the wind and carried across on wagons states away. And all he had were the whispers without a guarantee to be found anyplace. But the message itself was too compelling to ignore: a man was offering up his only daughter, fire-headed and alabaster, at the first edge of womanhood, unspoiled. That last one she had to wonder about. How was that word defined? Did untoward paternal hands count even if they were fought against as regularly as evening prayer? And what of a mother’s silence? If the hands bruised one thigh, surely hush bruised the other. Children who had to contemplate such things were already denied what was theirs by right.

But there was Paul, rifle on his back pointing toward the sky. Younger then, but still much older than she was. He was possessed of a strong jaw and piercing eyes. She would gladly take her chances for whatever it was her father was willing to receive as payment.

The soil was moist and she took a bit of it and placed it on her tongue, a note of sweetness in her mouth before she chewed and swallowed. This was a part of her. She was a part of this. She lay down on the ground and let herself be hidden between flower stalks. This was, to her, a gentle act and she wondered if she should allow herself to fall asleep right there, where she felt she belonged more than anywhere else.

That was when it caught her by surprise. Out of the corner of her eye, there was a warm light that seemed to blush its way into existence. Quietly, as though not wanting to disturb or take up too much space, but simply to exist without fear of being extinguished, to share its glow with other things to bring out the golden in them, to make eyes drowsy, hearts soft, and private areas wet with the need to be intimate without malice or retaliation. This light—and perhaps it was unfair to call it that because it didn’t cause her to wince—emanated from that space beyond the fence, through the weeds, over another fence, in the breach that was the barn.