The Prophets(90)

He thought that all this pretend movement would have given him the desire to move himself, but it just made him tired. He simply wanted to close his eyes even if there was danger in it. In slumber, there was . . .

What?

Rest for the body maybe, but nothing for the weary. His head nodded forward and then jerked back up. His eyes were dreary. He worried about how he might look to the festive toubab, even as they were distracted, for a night, by the smoke and spirits. He feared the thing hidden somewhere in the bowels of their laughter, that thing that made them say to niggers what they would say to themselves if they had any courage, what they used to say to one another before niggers became an unfortunate disruption. If they noticed him now, barely able to hold his head up straight because the night struck him, they would say niggers were lazy, but they would be incorrect. Niggers weren’t lazy; niggers were tired. Bone tired. And when they finally weren’t anymore: fire.

He let his eyes close. The last thing he saw was the red light creeping out of the saloon, shifting shape, blending with the night to give everything its dull glow.

“Bloody,” Adam said, grinning.

When he finally fell asleep, head lolling, and snoring, he dreamt of nothing but words.



* * *



—

WHEN ADAM SAW PAUL, raggedy, in front of him it was as though disparate pieces of his reality snapped immediately into place. Adam wasn’t pleased with the picture that formed. Paul reeked of spirits, and his clothes were wrinkled, shirt untucked, and pants unfastened. He was dirty. He had lost his balance and swayed in order to keep it. And his hat was missing. Adam felt a twinge in the pit of his stomach.

“Massa. Is everything all right, suh?” he said with a genuine look of concern wearing him like it was the true face and his was the mask.

Paul slurred a response that Adam couldn’t understand. He hopped down from the coach and got a little closer. He caught Paul as Paul leaned a little too much into him and breathed hell straight into his nostrils, which made him hold his breath. This was the closest he had ever been to his father. Maybe father was too strong a word. Nevertheless, he had an urge to be in his embrace irrespective of the odor and the weight. Paul, in attempting to regain his composure, put his hands on Adam’s face.

“I need you . . .”

Adam stood, holding him, losing himself and forgetting where he was by looking into his face. He was amazed by the question because it seemed to be laced with tenderness. Paul’s hand on his cheeks, feeling the pulse of his body, and sweat forming right where the palm covered. Is this what it felt like to be someone’s child? He had never before felt so close to calling any man Pa, but there it was, rising in his throat, lodged on the back of the tongue, silky.

“God has blessed us.”

“Us, Massa?”

Paul looked at Adam and now his hands went from Adam’s cheeks to Adam’s chest. Adam’s eyes widened as a smile crept upon Paul’s lips. Unseemly, but maybe Paul had finally seen it, too—the identical bridge of nose and the same muscular forehead that was unmistakably Halifax. Not that he didn’t already know, but seeing it all this close made him a firsthand witness. He didn’t have to say. He didn’t have to say anything. Adam understood. Truth could be known as long as it wasn’t spoken. Given form, truth laid waste to even the most elaborate and fortified of walls. Not even the rubble was safe. Paul began to cough and Adam patted him on his back before grabbing the lantern sitting in the coach and holding it up to Paul’s face, almost as if he wanted to make sure he wasn’t dying.

Adam’s face went blank. Here he was holding this man who was shivering even though the heat had not let up because the sun had gone down, so it must have been the spirits and whatever else had messed his hair and clothing. Adam cleared his throat.

He felt a stirring in his stomach that was likely to push right through his spine and leave a hole there that his soul could use to crawl out of the body. To go somewhere, to do something that was worthy of him being here. Not the basic drudgery that only unimaginative people with the lowest of minds could conjure up. But something that would give him the time to contemplate whether darkness could, in fact, move on its own like it was indeed living. And despite what any toubab had said, he had a soul, and not because of the toubab who interfered and caused his creation.

Since Paul had said “us” like they were actually kin, perhaps a sliver could be made into a gap. Had he the courage, Adam would have asked him about his mother. What did she think about giving birth to this special child? (He had only thought of himself as special because of how he could go from fitting into to not fitting into so many of the spaces he inhabited.) This special child who came out of the womb of the blackest of women, bright as a sunbeam, and could have damn near been a toubab if not for the tattletale mouth.

Maybe Paul treated her special, too. But what could that mean on the condition of death or worse? Adam liked to make room for the possibilities. That is what the line that sliced him as surely as the prime meridian allowed: to dance on both sides, to think a thing in theory, to measure it, observe it, to let it wander the mind for no reason other than because that was the only private place for someone like him. At the end, he had a choice to make: either give it back to its proper owner or slide it into his own britches to be used at some later time, if he was still there to use it.

Paul stumbled again and Adam held on to him and lifted him back to his feet. He realized how even his dead weight wasn’t as heavy as he imagined it would be. Paul had been talking, mumbling some strange things about God that Adam could scarcely understand because Paul’s tongue was tied by the spirits. But that was less strange than how Paul had previously held Adam’s face between both of his hands and looked him in the eye and didn’t ask for Adam to look away. This was the first time Adam saw, unflinchingly, his father’s eyes, the same eyes that looked at his mother, or more honestly, looked away from her, and whatever was the thinnest line between the two.