The Prophets(51)

The house itself was built on top of bones. She could hear them rattling every once in a while because the shacks, too, were essentially tombstones for the land’s First People, often unengraved. Somehow she knew they meant her no harm but also that she might, like anyone else, get caught between the warring parties and die for being trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Puah walked to the front of the house. She took the handful of willow leaves with Ruth watching her from a chair on the porch, holding a bouquet. Ruth smiled at her briefly, which startled Puah. Then Ruth stood suddenly, dropping some of the flowers. Puah thought she raised Ruth’s ire. But Ruth looked toward the barn before sitting down in the chair again. She bent forward to pick up the stray petals and placed them in her lap. For a moment, Puah thought she detected something in Ruth. Regret? Nah. Regret was a high thing, out of reach for most. And there Ruth was: bending, stooping, sitting her behind down. Puah thought that perhaps what made Ruth what she was had something to do with her own beaches—where the tides sung her name gently—being snatched away upon tilting her own head the wrong way. Still, it couldn’t be entirely the same. Ruth’s place had to have had the common sun-bleached sands. And surely the daylight shined forever.

Maybe it was true that the barn was safer despite its proximity to the Big House. It might be better for Samuel and Isaiah if they didn’t insist upon being themselves. The individual always has to give something up for the group. Puah knew what women gave up, time after time, except for maybe Sarah, who created her own difficulties standing in her own spot. So it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable for Samuel and Isaiah to give something up, too, sacrifice whatever force locked them in embrace to appease voracious godlings that saw everything but knew less.

Puah walked slowly to avoid Ruth’s suspicion and headed west toward the river. She made her way down. The water rush soothed her. She stared at it for a moment before turning toward the brush. The huckleberries were right where Maggie said they would be, fat and juicy.

Now, Puah had to head south, past the Big House that she didn’t want to be near again, toward the cotton field and beyond it. She went behind the house this time lest she inspire Ruth’s curiosity. When she reached the edge of the field, she stopped, overwhelmed by the vastness before her, which she had never allowed herself to take in. That was reflex. She knew to never be too open because anything was liable to fly in. And once inside, well . . .

The expanse terrified her. She nearly choked on her breath. She watched birds dive in and out of the blinding sea before her and she wondered how she did it, day after day, back arched and knees bent, bowing against windless skies. And now, all she had to do was walk across it and into the dangerous land just beyond it for a peculiar plant that grew in an inconvenient place.

With grace, she moved. She never before realized how vulnerable being in the field made her. A span of puffy white heads and there she was: black flesh, easy to spot, easy to target, easy to strike. If this wasn’t for Samuel, she wouldn’t have answered the call. Everybody had their scars, so that was no special reason. But his eyes teased welcome and she couldn’t bear them shut forever. Nor could she endure the slit of Maggie’s disappointment. So she went.

Shoulders deep in it. Only she and her people knew that cotton had a smell. Not pungent or insulting, but something remotely sweet like a whispered song. But how something so soft could wreck the fingers she knew all too well.

She came to the southern end where the field gave way to high weeds. Surrounded now by pale green and dry yellow, she felt less conspicuous, but still exposed. This wasn’t a place she came to very often. Sometimes, she picked over here, but it was mostly the older people who did their work—not their work because it wasn’t voluntary and it wasn’t on their behalf—this close to the overseers’ shacks because they were old enough to recognize the futility of running and how could they anyway on feet already walked down to the nubs?

How many shacks here? About a dozen, maybe a few more, each as ramshackle as her people’s, if a bit larger. Some of them sat leaning, like they were built by unsteady hands. In any event, they formed a crooked line that led off to goodness knows where. Perhaps a forgotten sea or a forest that held captive the flying remains of the ones defeated in order to have a plantation in the first place.

She stepped out of the weeds and onto the dusty ground, worn by the trampling of dozens of feet, which created a kind of border between the plantation and the shacks. That was where they felt it, she thought. Separate from their deeds. Parted from the effects of their own havoc, which they refused to admit was their own doing, so it would, in some future time, long after she was dead she was certain, also be their undoing.

She was lucky. Most of the adults were at church or in their cabins asleep, or in some corner hiding from a sun that seemed to be plotting against them. Some of the older children were there, left behind to watch the younger ones, and they, too, watched Puah with something between contempt and longing. They scowled, yes. But their hands were also loose, not gripped into fists, which meant that she had a moment to do what she came to do before they remembered who they were.

She held her dress up, just above her ankles, and walked up to the closest shack, which, as Maggie said, had a patch of comfrey right at its base. It was beautiful, too. Deep green stalks and leaves accented with flowers that looked like tiny purple bells. The kids on the porch stopped playing their little game and jumped down near her.