The Prophets(43)
She lifted her gown to her knees, pulled it out from her legs to act as a shield between her and the why-isn’t-he-weeping? nigger supine at her feet. The other one dared to raise his head even if he didn’t look directly at her. She couldn’t tell the difference between envy and pity, so she didn’t know what to make of the look on his face.
“Look away,” she commanded.
Slowly, Isaiah turned his head to the horse pens. She looked that way too. Two horses, one brown, one white with brown splotches, poked their heads forward as if they were curious, wanted to see—as if they hadn’t seen enough already. But what would they hold on to? Would they remember this and, in a fit of solidarity, as beasts of burden are known for sometimes sticking together, pull her carriage off the road into some ravine, watching her tumble and break bones, and for what—a memory no creature had a right to let linger?
To hell with it all; she looked away. She fumbled first, reaching her hand down to undo Samuel’s pants and then squatted down onto the lap of the thing beneath her. She threw her head back for no reason. There was no joy. There was no exaltation. Underneath her, there was no mountainous terrain, only plateaus, which would have been offensive to anyone who expected at least hands raised in worship.
“Are you broken?”
She didn’t even look at him when she asked because no answer could smooth the offense. She cussed herself just a bit for thinking she could succeed where only failure had been spoken. Above her head, she thought she heard the roof creak, as though the weight of this place was finally too much. Should the whole thing cave in, pulling in the barn, the animals, the trees, the ground, and the sky itself, how uncomely it would be for them to find her remains sharing the same space as these unbaptized barn hands. What was she doing there? they would ask, knowing full well what she was doing, but because speaking ill of the dead is an affront to Christ, who rose Himself up just to make that message clear, and who will, at some unknown point, return just to confirm it, they would cry and bless her name, and the truth would be buried with her.
Ruth became aware of her weight on top of Samuel. And the weight of Isaiah’s eyes. And the weight of all the children who never had the chance to be. And across her back, she felt the measure of Paul’s palm, how he steadied her when she shook, and how that must have been the influence of his mother, Elizabeth, whose name was given to the land, and she felt grateful for what he could remember of his mother that helped him retain a piece of kindness reserved especially for Ruth.
She covered her head, but the roof didn’t fall in on her. The creak she thought she heard was nothing more than the whimper of the nigger who was looking away at her command. There she was in the middle of a mess and couldn’t remember how it had come to be. She recalled the glow and before that, the flowers and the soil. She concluded that this was a place that played tricks on the mind. Oh, and the weight. Clearly, the pressure had become just too much, and it made her dizzy. The only cure was to return to where the air made sense.
“Get off me!” she shouted before she stood up, suddenly, letting her gown’s edge drop back down to her ankles. She was standing, but she didn’t move any farther. She once again became transfixed by the lamplight, which flickered but wouldn’t extinguish. The light itself, she noticed, had a dark spot at its core. “That,” she said to herself, “that is where we are!” But how, she wondered. How could just moving from one side of the fence to the other transport her from light to no-light? She stumbled over to the lamp and kicked it over. It didn’t ignite the hay and threaten to engulf the entire barn in flames. It simply went out.
Now in a dark room, with only the occasional grunts of animals, the labored breathing of the whining nigger, and the pointy silence of the forced-quiet one to remind her that she was still where she was, she looked up. She hadn’t noticed it before when she thought the roof was collapsing onto her head. There was a rectangular opening that let the sky in and she saw, in that little opening, the sky that had become so familiar to her. It was peppered with tiny white stars, the only audience she felt it harmless to stand before, shining down on her at a safe distance, giving her the direction she had been asking for the entire time, but that no one was able to give her.
She walked in a circle. She raised her hands. She laughed. That last piece was a knowing. She knew she had access to things no one else had ever seen before. They would think her mad, but she knew better. She knew that there was a long line of women, from every side of the sea, who survived long enough so she could be here in this moment. And more than survived; they wanted to see to it that she wouldn’t be condemned to the lives they had little choice but to lead. Each of them, now dots in an inky sky, guiding her away from witch hunts and burnings, from rapes and conjugal beds, the chastity and modesty designed by men to be foisted upon the backs and fronts of women, but only for the leisure, pleasure, and whims of men. Hosanna!
That was why she lost the children! It came to her in just that very moment. Not as punishment, but as liberation. What this meant was that Timothy, her Timothy, whom she had thanked God for, was either a help, and so was allowed to pass through, or a harm, and her misguided but well-intentioned prayers had undone centuries of careful planning because she failed to recognize a blessing when it was trying to be bestowed upon her. So then maybe his journey to the North was for good. Maybe it was to set right a grievous wrong, a spell to undo the folly of putting a throned man above a cascade of women who went down screaming so she wouldn’t have to.