The Prophets(95)

“Miss Maggie, I gotta . . .”

“I know.” Maggie smiled. “A shame, but you gotta.”

She took a couple of broken steps over to him and she threw her arms around him. Samuel stiffened up. He was afraid that the shadow might ride her back again and grab him along with her arms that were holding him now. But he didn’t see it, which gave him the room he needed to bend a bit into Maggie’s embrace. She patted the top of his head.

“Foolish,” she said softly. “But if you finna go this-a-away . . .” She pointed toward the kitchen and the doorway on its right. Then she stopped. “You know something, you remind me of somebody. Man called Ayo Itself, but toubab called him Daniel.”

Samuel smiled at that first name because it sounded like it meant something important. He looked at her. “You warm, Miss Maggie. Always been.”

Then he walked off the porch.

He walked through the house slowly, straining to see the rooms filled with stuff—lots of things he couldn’t imagine the use for. And so many looking glasses, which didn’t surprise him in the least. He looked into one and thought he saw two faces. Maybe that other one was his mother’s?

He climbed the stairs and the shadows flickered and faded, grew and shrank as he ascended and made his way down the second-floor hallway. When he reached Timothy’s room, which was right where Timothy said it would be, Timothy was standing there, not far from the door, naked as day one, in the dark. Samuel nearly dropped the lantern.

“I’m not certain when my father will return, but I imagine it will be soon.” Timothy smiled. “He didn’t take James with him, so I don’t know if he’ll stay out as long.”

He pulled Samuel close to him and planted a kiss squarely on his mouth. Samuel jerked a little, revolted by how catfish it felt. Timothy, noticing his shock, slowly pulled away.

“I imagine you’ve never been in a bed like this before,” he said, pointing at it. He moved closer to Samuel again now that he could see that the ice had been broken and perhaps the bulge in Samuel’s pants wasn’t a trick of shadows. “Have you?” Timothy whispered in Samuel’s ear.

Samuel shook his head.

“Come.”

Timothy walked him over to the bed.

“You can put the lantern down over there,” he said, pointing to a desk in front of the windows.

Samuel looked out at the moon, a bright white half circle in the dark. He hadn’t realized before that Timothy was the same frosty color, and he wondered if that was where all toubab came from, if they fell here by accident or punishment, and that was why they were all so troubled: they were merely homesick.

Samuel looked in the mirror that stood in a corner of Timothy’s room. Isaiah once told him that he might find his mother’s face in his own. So when he would go to the river, he would look at his reflection to see. There was his face, only slightly distorted on the water’s skin. When he smiled, he thought that maybe the dimples that appeared on his cheeks were where he could see her. Locked in a grin, he found her where he had never before thought to look. And perhaps in the way his nose flared and spread across his face with that knowing, perhaps that signaled his father, from whom he was certain he received his impatience and stubborn clinging to love.

In the mirror, the image was much clearer than that of the river. He looked closely. Something tumbled from his eyes that was not tears. War maybe, the wild. There was a time and place for wild, but it mostly had to be curbed, reserved, set aside to keep from interfering in the moments when he had to be tender. Or wily.

He thought about what his father must have been like, whether he was forced upon his mother in some other Fucking Place. Some of them forced, anyway. He wondered if they had, instead, stumbled upon each other, clumsily, but of their own free will, pulled together in an awkward movement and slightly averted gazes, but smiles nonetheless. Free as will could be under the circumstances. Like him and Isaiah.

What Samuel didn’t know, he invented. His father’s name, then, was Stuart, a name he had heard Paul call a friend of his once. Samuel liked it immediately because it reminded him of hock-spitting, something he imagined his father to have done in the face of his own master, which explained his absence. He probably got his strength from Stu, Samuel figured, though he imagined it was his mother who survived.

“I know you’re not as shy as you seem,” Timothy said to him, breaking Samuel’s concentration. “I’ve seen you and Isaiah, you know. At night, I’ve seen you.”

Samuel shifted uncomfortably. The blade dug into his back.

“Take off your clothes, Samuel. Or should I call you Sam? Come lie with me.”

Slowly, Samuel removed his shirt. Timothy shuddered.

“You’re a different color than Isaiah.” Timothy’s eyes softened and he stroked his own cheek. “He said purple was the one he liked most. I thought he was just repeating my words back to me.” He rose from the bed and moved toward Samuel.

“In the North, it snows in the wintertime. You know what snow is? Have you ever seen it? No, probably not. Doesn’t happen here much.” He touched Samuel’s chest. “It’s what happens when it rains, but it’s so cold outside, the rain freezes and comes out of the sky like tiny pieces of cotton. It’s a beautiful sight. The ground gets coated with it and somehow, things get so quiet. Children love it. They play and laugh and throw it at one another. Makes it hard to walk around, though. Wagons can’t even come down the road. You can’t even see the road actually because it’s all covered in snow. The whole world, it seems, turns white. It’s so peaceful.” He traced his finger down to Samuel’s navel. “But after a few days, after people have trampled through it and it has started to melt, everything gets so messy. And it musses your clothes and you tramp the mess into your room and all you start to do is long for the spring again. I swear, you’d sell your soul just to see a flower bloom somewhere. That’s what made me miss home. Up in Massachusetts, the winters are so long and brutal you start to think you’ll never see a flower again. That’s not true, of course. But for a little while, you think that the color won’t come back ever. Maybe one day you’ll get to see the North in the winter.”