The Prophets(71)

He was waiting until Isaiah had become a man, or if he had the inkling that either one of them was going to be sold away, before Amos revealed Isaiah to himself. You know your name is Kayode? Haha! No, not kie-oh-TEE. Kuh-yo-DAY. Your mam tell me it mean “he brings joy” in the old tongue of her mother’s mother. Must be that in her misery-misery world, you one of the only things that ever make her smile truly. Yes suh. Oh, what’s that? Where was she? In Georgia, sure ’nough. Yes, your pappy was there too, but it be best if’n I don’t say what I saw of him that wet and greedy day other than I remember this: your face is his face.

It would have been their own quiet celebration, something Isaiah could have taken back with him into that barn and shared with Samuel, something Amos himself could have brought back to Essie, helping all of them to endure the breeding that had to be done so that they could live live, even if just in short bursts in the dark, rather than just survive.

He didn’t mean to use it as extortion. He saw the look on Isaiah’s face when he wouldn’t reveal it. There, then, he remembered Isaiah’s father’s face: all twisted up in the way it does when the soul is trying to leave the body. The difference between grief and sorrow lay there, a cavern in the face that threatened heartbreak for all witnesses, or, in Amos’s new language, the threat of being turned to living salt, to be like an upright but unmoving sea.

In the brand-new tongue of his master’s people, he had contemplated a different trinity. If Samuel and Isaiah’s natures rose only in each other’s company, then why not allow them each other and the pleasure of one more? Samuel and Isaiah, father and son; he wasn’t sure what the order was there. Samuel was bigger, but one could never know with twisted shadows. Puah could be the Holy Ghost. Three to make one. One out of three. This might have been the way, the truth, the light.

But, no. His gut, which is to say, his god, told him that this would have been even more obscene than what was already happening in the lair of the golden calf, would open up caverns that led to no one knows where. Besides that, Amos knew not near none of them would have it. Shame was a sturdy master with strong legs and clinging embrace.

He was almost primed to accept failure—until he dreamed that he saw Essie in their shack, turned to the side, staring at the wall, Solomon crawling at her feet and pulling at the edge of her dress.

“Paul saw me,” she muttered. “He saw me.”

That was it. Samuel and Isaiah left him no choice. They had rebuked all entreaties, no matter how reasonable. The stubbornness of youth had left them incapable of compromise. If they were determined to make this a war, then this was Amos’s only strategy: always, always, the many must have its safety over the few.

This would be his final act, he believed. Yes, that was what rumbled inside him. His mouth began to bend into the cavern he hoped never to see again. Eyes misty, he held it all back. He wiped his face with his hands and, surprisingly, took on the weight of clouds above. In them, though, he saw a dark something, waiting for him, ready, it seemed, to raise its sword in battle if it had to.



* * *



—

MAGGIE HELD HER HAND up before her, almost expecting it, alone, to stop Amos in his tracks. She had briefly forgotten how powerful Paul’s god was. And she was, after all, standing on the land that was now his, the very land that his god waged war on, defeating the gods that used to reign here on their own sacred territory, which Maggie didn’t even know was possible. With all of the force that sustained them right beneath their feet, how was it that these old gods, who weren’t so unfamiliar to her people’s gods, succumbed to the vigor of the newer and less wise? What chance did she have against that kind of power, removed as she was from the land where she should have been born and the people she should have been born to?

What she didn’t understand was how Amos had been able to find this god’s favor. He who had militarized his people—armed them with icy glares, boom-cannons, ships that could survive the tumultuous gray waters, and His leather-bound instruction—and led them to bounty. And what bounty meant to them was everything: not just the land, but the trees, the animals, the voices, the children. This god had expressed nothing but disdain for them and yet, here it was, fully shining on Amos in such a way that he paid her hand, which was held there by the voices and the shadows, no heed.

“Don’t cross these bones!” Maggie said loudly, not caring, for the moment, who heard her.

Amos continued to walk toward the Big House. Maggie’s mouth dropped. She moved back some. Quickly, she picked up a stick and drew a circle with an X inside it, then spit. Amos continued right past it. Stunned, she scuttled back even more. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a pouch. Inside it was rock salt. She threw it on the ground in front of Amos and finally, he stopped. He looked down at the pouch in front of his feet.

“Cross that and not near none of us can stop what happens next,” Maggie said.

“I shoulda known you was the dark cloud,” Amos said calmly. “This a mistake, Mag. I ain’t got no quarrel with you.”

“What you finna do—I got a quarrel with that.” She put her hands on her hips.

“I been patient. I tried to . . .”

“‘Patient’? You talking they words now; talk ours.”

Amos swatted away a fly, or maybe it was Maggie’s words. In either event, his hand went up by his face in a flurry. When he finally came to a stop, Maggie eyed him up and down.