The Prophets(44)

Now that there was no further need for the circle, she stopped. She felt dizzy. She moved away from whiny-whiny and stepped over the sharp silence. On her way back to the entrance, the life she left behind was in view, just a sliver between the crack of doors, but it was where she knew she had a better chance of belonging and she rushed toward it. She pulled open the doors and the heaviness was there. She sprinted quickly, her gown in her way, but it didn’t slow her down. She climbed the gate this time, wanting to go over something rather than under it, but it never occurred to her to use the entrance because that was unnecessary if there was no one there to open it for her and close it behind her.

The garden had called her name, but she didn’t have the time now. She would see it again in the daylight. She, Maggie, and Essie would come with the gift of water, the sweet kind from the well. No, it wasn’t a waste to use that in the garden. Water was abundant and always would be. Besides, it welcomed the congress, for look what it produced.

She dashed into the Big House, up the stairs, and burst into her room. It was hot and it smelled like her, which is to say that it smelled like lavender and dirt and the two together she didn’t mind. She took off her nightgown and let it fall to the floor. Watching it crumpled there reminded her that she had just been rejected. How did that escape her before? The silence and the weeping, and also the heaviness and the glowing, had managed to distract her and given her too much to contemplate to even consider taking what had always been hers to begin with. Still, there was something she could extract from this to fill her belly. All she had to say was a word.

She looked down at her feet. They weren’t dirty—not on the tops and not on the soles. That was impossible because she had gone from garden, to weeds, to horse shit, to dust and hay, and back again. Yet, her feet were as clean as if she had just soaked and bathed. Perhaps it was true then: she could float. Like some pure angel, a kind of feather, or her starry sisters, she could free herself from the confines of the ground itself, call out her own name, and be lifted, just a little, up to a more suitable air.

She went over to her dresser and took another gown from it. She put it on and it was weightless. She smiled uncontrollably. When she finally lay down to return to rest, it felt different. It felt like lying down in sky.

It felt like flying.





Babel

At dawn, the trees of Empty were as ferocious as they were during the shade of night. Looming and towering, stationed at the borders, beckoning high above the fog, but only in the interest of luring close enough to kill. Kill whom? It depends. But lately one kind in particular. These trees are no home, not to the sparrow or the blue jay, nor to the ant or caterpillar. These trees, some upright, some gnarled, some felled, all sentinels, tasked with one bit of labor: to witness. And maybe they do, but what use is a witness who would never offer up testimony?

But, oh yes. The testimony is there, to be pried from them only. The streaks on their bodies, the gashes revealing the white meat beneath, the cracked branches snapped holding the weight. There are reasons for every split, but they never tell, not even when asked. You must know, therefore, how to prod, where to seek. Peering into the cuts that lead to the roots: roots that lead to soil: soil that doesn’t lie, but curls beneath the toes of those whose blood nourishes it, who in other lands was skin-family, just like the cosmos above. One day someone will tell the story, but never today.

These trees, they guarded the edges. The most crucifying places were at the edges, there where the plantation met the land that had no owners (so said the people who were killed for challenging the idea that the dirt could have an owner). These were the roads, hot from the Mississippi sun, but not dry because the air was too thick, where even horses walked more freely than the people, insects hovering in the sovereignty they took wholly for granted, and the outer woods, the rivers rushing forward to who knows where, the arc of skies, low but forever out of reach. All these things never to be touched by any of them without great cost: a loss of limbs or a separation of spirit from body, the latter being the most preferable, but cowards would never understand that because liberty is more bitter than sweet.

And what of the homeless birds? They fly over in judgment. Almost all of them: the sparrow and the blue jay, and also the dove and the robin, but the raven is nowhere to be found. And the crashing of their voices would singe if the ones at whom they were cackling weren’t already burned by summer. So for the incinerated, the robin in particular was only music.

And there was, too, another rhythm beneath, a quiet pulse, one that had started even before the march out to the ends of Empty. Isaiah and Samuel thought they were the only ones who could hear it. Blithely, it whistled not so much in the wind as in the swaying of hands and hips, like in the midday praise in the clearing where they weren’t welcome unless . . . But the sound traveled and reached some ears whether they wanted to hear or not. It wasn’t, in fact, the people singing as they had first thought. It was someone else, or more than someone, judging from the harmonies. It sounded like something old and comforting, which made Samuel feel silly and Isaiah act it.

Ruth had to say but one word, and James, who had to act even if he didn’t believe, rounded up his barely-men to shake Isaiah and Samuel out of slumber—even before The Two of Them had a chance to rise and shine into each other’s faces, sweep up the hay they had fashioned into a bed, and greet morning with the same trepidation they would for the rest of their lives. How quickly and forcefully they snatched Samuel and Isaiah up and ordered them to stand. And the gleeful yet rough-hewn manner with which they fastened the shackles to their wrists and ankles. And then the spikes.