The Prophets(65)

Isaiah sat rigidly on the edge of the bed.

“Relax.”

Isaiah stood up, which made his erection obvious. Timothy smiled.

“I saw you last night. In the barn. You and Samuel. I saw what you do.”

Isaiah turned away.

“Massa, I can’t . . .”

“Can’t?”

“What I mean is . . . Samuel is . . .”

Timothy stood up. He moved in close to Isaiah, close enough that their breaths mingled. Isaiah’s brow sweated profusely.

“You deserve someone to be gentle with you for once,” Timothy whispered.

Isaiah shook his head.

“Samuel . . .”

Timothy leaned in and kissed Isaiah on the mouth. Samuel’s name still on Isaiah’s lips, now trapped between them. Isaiah didn’t kiss back. Timothy used his own lips and tongue to pry Isaiah’s mouth open. Isaiah grunted.

“I can protect you from my father,” Timothy moaned, his body pressed into Isaiah’s.

While he didn’t wish to have Isaiah come to him out of obligation, it would be a suitable, less violent option should Isaiah choose not to come of his own free will. What he wouldn’t do was force him beyond that. Because what would be the point if Isaiah did not submit freely, if Timothy couldn’t have every last bit of him, including his will?

Timothy pulled down his trousers and lay ass-up on the bed. Isaiah squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. He wiped his brow and then lay down on top of Timothy. Beneath, Timothy thought of how he had relinquished himself to Isaiah; he was in his hands now. And something fluttered in his chest. He grabbed hold of it and when he opened his grip, there it was, duller than he imagined, but there: free. If he was to give this to Isaiah, then it could only come back to him, as all things did, manifold. To set another man free was to free yourself. This wasn’t just the clamoring of an indecisive North, no. Timothy felt the truth of that way down in his cave, which quivered now after having justly been shaken.

“Together, we can be set free,” Timothy whispered as he raised his head and closed his eyes. “Only together.”





Nebuchadnezzar

It had never dawned on Isaiah how things so close together could be so far apart. The barn was just yonder, a good stone’s throw from the Big House, and yet, when walked by legs, the distance between them felt like a journey. The house seemed to be at the bottom of some enormous mountain, or down, maybe, in some deep valley where the thinnest of rivers hid from the sky and wolves roamed. Down there, where you expected it to be warmer, and yet things were chilled enough to blue the hands and feet, and turn breath to smoke.

And here you were, lost and at a loss for how anyone barefoot and without tools could make his way out of it, climb surfaces that seemed too smooth to cling to or too solid to dig into, with nothing but what might be an errant star to guide you upward, into the place that is only marginally safer than the place you’re trying to escape.

What of the ascent itself? Isaiah had a strong mind, and he couldn’t figure out if it was at all worth it. A road that was supposed to be level was sloped and its incline became more difficult with each step. There was nothing to stop him from tumbling back down right as he reached the uppermost part of it. You could break your bones and then there would no longer be a point in getting up and trying again. You wouldn’t be able to. Couldn’t.

Yet, the yearning that pulled him at his center like a rope that had been thrown down from the mountaintop, from the level plains at the top of the ridge, from the places that were supposed to be cold but somehow, maybe because they were closer to the sun, were warm to every touch. The grass took on a different character: dewy and blue green instead of dry and gold. People and animals lived together in what he guessed you could call a kind of harmony, but it came from barest necessity rather than a haunting desire. There was one reason, and one reason only, to make the attempt to, wingless and unsure-footed, try to ascend any old way.

By the time the birds had finished singing, after they had completed their circling of his head, he remembered the pain. His own, yes, because it can only be tragedy to be forced, but doubly so when the body refuses to fail; also Timothy’s because he was unprepared. Isaiah hadn’t anticipated finding a hint of joy in being the source of it. Besides, whatever joy there was quickly faded once he realized that it was the kind of thing that Timothy had no objection to. It was all so very bizarre, and also very new to Isaiah, to learn that toubab had not only relished giving it out, but secretly—in their quiet places, out of the sight of anyone who might judge it horribly, use it against them, or give to them in a way for which they were truly unprepared—they were intent on receiving it.

Timothy cried, but his eyes also rolled into the back of his head just like Samuel’s and Isaiah did everything he knew how to do to ensure those faces, those expressions, Samuel’s and Timothy’s, didn’t merge. Somehow, he knew that once they did, only death would be able to untangle them.

He was halfway up the mountain—or midway out of the valley—when he realized that, outside this between time, he had missed a whole day’s work, hadn’t seen Samuel the entire day, had left him to do everything on his own, which was difficult because just about everything in the barn was a job for two people. It would be barely possible for Samuel to do it alone. He knew Samuel didn’t want to do any of it, period, but they had a system. Everyone knew that.