• CHAPTER 11 •
Unravel
[1]
Two months prior to Frances and Joy’s arrival, Saint and her companion went away for a few weeks without telling anyone, except Selah and Naima. When they returned, they brought with them a new set of Negroes whose so-called masters had met their ends beneath Saint’s staff. This group was much smaller than the last, made up of only twenty-two Negroes from three small plantations scattered across the South and Southwest.
The new Ouhmey were given houses that had become empty after years of people moving out west on their own, to Saint’s chagrin and against her warnings. Ours’s seclusion became too much for some, and Saint didn’t want a revolt from anyone thinking she was forcing them to stay. But each time someone packed up and departed, she told those who remained, “There may be worse things than slavery in the west. I can’t rightfully say.” That succeeded in keeping the rest from leaving town.
A few new smaller houses were built on every street for new residents taken in after future plantation sweeps. Reverend received a new house, which he turned into a living space and a church that no one attended. Thylias rejected a house, opting to stay with Franklin until he died, saying, “I’m staying here till he die or I die. Whichever firstly come.” Franklin didn’t protest, though he had wanted to.
The twenty-two new residents joined the community and brought much-needed life into town. When they arrived, they basked in the smell of lilac and held their breath to keep both it and the sweet scent of baking cakes in their nostrils. The roads were rough with pebbles but wide, and between each house stretched space enough for two or more houses. They imagined building work sheds, maintaining lush gardens, and playing with their children in the fields between and all around.
Then there were the children of Ours, of all sizes and running around, kicking up nimbuses of dust and filling the town with laughter. When not in school, they spilled into the roads, played wherever they wanted, dirtied their dresses and giggled at the games they made up on the spot. They ran around one man whose name they learned was Reverend, teasing him, hugging his legs so he couldn’t move, and asking him to talk about Jesus. He swatted them away and the new Ouhmey swore they saw the flash of a grin on Reverend’s face.
One woman from the new group decided that all the women should formally meet twice a month to talk about what it meant to be free women. She went by the name Glory Jenkins, but everyone called her Madame Jenkins because of the hoity-toity way she carried herself. It was no compliment, though she took it as one and everyone poked fun at her behind her back. How a once-enslaved woman got these ways, some Ouhmey thought, was either from being up under a so-called master’s womenfolk or up under the so-called master who, ambushed by his own proclivities, had to at least train the Negress of the house regardless of him hiding her when white company arrived. Others thought Madame Jenkins an immense pleasure and wanted her company because they, too, felt highly of themselves, and why not?
As time passed, Madame Jenkins’s ways infiltrated the ways and thinking of some of the other residents. She suggested they get together and talk amongst themselves about their specific issues as Negro women in the somewhat south. Why not share recipes and remedies (“Just sit some pennies in vinegar and your money come rolling in”)? Why not think freely, complexly, and share those thoughts to see how life could be made easier for them all?
It took little time for her to slide into the rhythm of woman-life, and they welcomed her enthusiastically, helping her clean her tiny home, sweeping from the back of the house to the front and tossing the dirt at the foot of a tree, while commenting on how she should just take the bigger house next door, “cause it’s been empty for some time,” and Madame Jenkins smiled and said, “No. I’m tired of places where things can be hidden from me,” and when the women all looked up at her, she almost cried from embarrassment until they looked down at the same time and returned to sweeping in the quiet of their mutual understanding that, yes, there is danger in a house with too many rooms.
At the first meeting, three women came. They each brought something to eat and a question they desperately needed answers to. They were fine with keeping the group small until one woman had problems with hitting her husband and the women in town gathered her up and sat in a circle fifty-deep in the grass behind the tiny house. They put the woman in the center and each of those forty-nine other women, Madame Jenkins included, said something beautiful about her: “You send your babies to school clean and straight-backed,” “Your smile make me jealous of your lips,” “I wish we was sisters cause you be knowing the good in things,” and they laughed until Madame Jenkins entered the circle with the woman and asked her as loud as she could, “Ruth, who you when you hit Mathias?” and the woman sat alone in her head for a moment, then answered, “Can’t be nobody but me,” and Madame Jenkins asked the woman to stand and gave her a hug. “The you I know wouldn’t hurt a bug.” Then the rest of the women left from their part of the circle and one by one whispered both their disappointment and encouragement to Ruth, hugged her fiercely after they finished. By the final hug, Ruth was a crying mess, promising to do better. At the end of the meeting, she tearfully asked, “When we meeting again?”
Madame Jenkins invited Saint to one of the meetings, but Saint declined, impressed by the idea. “I appreciate you considering, Miss Saint,” Madame Jenkins said, thinking Saint a much younger woman than she was, and carried on with the thirty-plus women who wanted to.
One of the aftermaths of Madame Jenkins’s intervention was that her own relentlessly eager disposition toward romantic partnership infected the younger women. The older women warned the young ladies against Madame Jenkins’s desire for male affection, but the idea of romance, its possibility, burned new and irresistible. Soon, they sought out young men for regular and public one-on-one rendezvous around town. This did two things: First, it made it obvious that there were more women than men in the town. Second, it created a need for new businesses to entertain the new couples ambling about with nothing to do but garden work, animal work, Delacroix work, and learning their letters. Mr. Wife’s bakery became more popular than ever and with added visitation meant added visibility for Justice and Luther-Philip. But both boys rejected all suitors, Justice with a heavier lean into the darker edge of his personality. So awkward he was impolite, Justice scrunched his face and looked at the floor when a young woman waved at him. If she flirted, he flared his nostrils and turned away. Luther-Philip blushed but still said no. His kind rejections made the women swoon even more and eventually he had a line of potential suitors lapping up sweet bread just to be near him. Some brought him gifts of new clothes sewn just for him or a small basket of fried fish. They giggled and he darkened two shades, grinning all the while.
[2]
Though neither Selah nor Naima could tell, their living in seclusion had made them strange and more like the ghosts of children than living children. Where once their visible youth protected them from scrutiny, their blossoming into nine-year-olds made what were once considered petulant phases into worrisome futures.
They were juveniles but not toddlers, young but not incapable, such that their distinct vulgarities—Selah’s overly polite manner while disregarding what had been communicated to her, even walking away in the middle of being spoken to; and Naima’s ghastly and relentless rudeness that only deepened as she aged—were no longer adorable oddities.
They mostly interacted with others while running errands for Saint, but their presence, off-putting as two headless dolls, made it difficult for the Ouhmey to welcome them. After all, they were Saint’s kin of sorts and isolation had warped the twins into foxes: skeptical of their surroundings and in constant search of an escape route.
The Ouhmey did think it a shame that Naima and Selah should be as cooped up as they were. The girls didn’t attend school, which made them unfamiliar to the rest of the children in town. But it also never occurred to the Ouhmey to welcome the twins beyond their given tasks. No invitations to play with their young’uns, no thank-you gifts, no just-baked cookies wrapped in fabric. They were simply “Saint’s girls,” and though the Ouhmey believed Saint had grown warmer, she kept herself even farther from them than when Ours was first created. Half the time they forgot about her, the other half they missed her with an intensity that bordered resentment. And because the twins sensed hostility in indifference, they armored themselves without apology.
Then Selah, upon seeing Frances step long-legged from the hall of trees, felt for the first time a human-sourced fear that delighted her so much that she hid her face in Saint’s dress. Naima, seeing Joy’s long hair drape over her shoulders and mix in with shawls that were almost as colorful as Saint’s floor fabrics, stood a bit in front of Saint and Selah in a defensive pose as though welcoming a messenger of war. She paid no attention to Frances until Frances got up close, her towering figure making her difficult to ignore. Naima thought, ‘Who this man with all this leg,’ and returned her attention to the woman with the shawls, the too-much hair, and sad mouth, who up close had the most frightening aura and eyes to match: an aura of death and eyes the color of honey throwing back candlelight.
Saint welcomed the two visitors and told them to follow her to Franklin’s wagon. Thylias sat on the porch, shotgun between her thighs, hair bun a frozen demigod atop her head. She laid the gun across her lap and smiled when Frances smiled at her and shouted from the road, “My name Frances. This Joy.”
Franklin drove them all to Creek’s Bridge in a quilt-covered wagon, so shoddily made it was deviant. No one spoke the duration of the trip. Franklin kept his gaze ahead and Joy, still bitten by Frances’s chastisement at the cabin, took to throwing her anxiety at Naima, who had nerve enough to stare her down. They walked the rest of the way from Creek’s Bridge.
Frances, followed by Saint, entered Saint’s house first while Joy waited cautiously outside with the twins. The moment the door closed behind them, the fireplace blazed up and a book on the table flipped through all its pages, front cover to back, then slammed shut before sliding across the table, stopping right at the edge. Then the orange fire in the fireplace became blue and the light turned the room into an underwater scene. Children’s laughter filled the room, followed by the sounds of chains and crying. When hands reached out from the floor and grabbed Frances by the ankles, Saint thought to interrupt the vision somehow, but the hands weren’t pulling Frances in, rather pulling themselves up through the floor as full-bodied children. Where should’ve been legs were fish tails belted by chains. Manacles braced their wrists and chain links dangled down from the metal rings, ending with clipped links from where they had been broken from the rest of their length. The children swam through the room unburdened by the metal they wore, laughing and spinning around Frances, who reached up and danced with them. Saint regarded Frances’s walnut-colored skin stained blue by the blue flame. The color engulfed even the whites of Frances’s eyes.
The room filled with swimming, filled with the blue percussion of iron on iron, of restraints clanging into song. Blue fire wavered and its light painted a sea on the walls. Leaving the circle, one child swam toward Saint. Eye to eye, the child leaned in, squinted, and jolted back. Saint didn’t recoil when the child reached cautiously for her cheek and shook their head as though disbelieving what they saw. Satisfied with the feel of her skin on their own, they said, tearfully, “Us.” Then, the entire scene ended as though it had never begun: The fire burned orange again in the fireplace. The swimming, fish-tailed children disappeared, replaced by the dull flamelight entering and mingling with the darkness it couldn’t conquer.
By the fireplace, Saint stood holding herself, disturbed by what she had seen and even more by what she felt. Children’s laughter echoed in her mind and a grave homesickness tore through her.
“You haunted?” Saint asked.
Frances laughed. “If I’m haunted, then you just as much a ghost as they are.”
The circumference of her suspicion widened, and Saint felt both validated and regretful that she had decided to let Joy and Frances stay with her just so she could observe them.
Frances had already gone back outside, cool air racing in from the door she left ajar. Saint closed the door. Salt stink had filled the room, like the Apalachicola had crept through the crack of the open door and steered into her front room. Disregarding the cold, she opened the windows to relieve her home of the smell of the sea—foam frothing the water’s surface, fish stink, brackish smell of decay. Sea for sure, not coming in from the once-open door but pouring from the mouth of the fireplace whose flame now softly asserted its heat, casting low shadows that shook like frightened animals beneath the chairs.
[3]
Joy refused to greet anyone in Ours on the rare occasion that she did go to town, and she resisted going for as long as she could. She refused to help at the school as a teacher, brilliant as she was, and refused to get to know the other women over tea. When men acknowledged her, she turned away. When women appraised her, she faked a cough to avoid looking into their eyes and seeing her own face fade away in a tear-mirrored reflection.
Folks thought she had “the consumption” and, instead of staying away, offered her even more help: noxious teas, sleep remedies, more soups than she could stand, herb-scented compresses, spice-laden berry cobblers, mint-soaked rags from which to inhale—it wore her down, this frequent and unrequested generosity of others, until what drove her off became a craving.
It took her passing the abandoned-looking, one-story house for her fearful concentration to return. Most of the plants had died in the cold, leaving the boney remnants of burgeoning thick-stemmed weeds and invasive trees to claw their skeleton remains against the house and sky. Smoke unspooled from the chimney and filthy windows shut out what little sunlight touched the panes. Standing in the doorway, a shirtless and withered man with a round belly looked out to the road, his solemnity infecting the air. Joy stopped and nodded at the man, who nodded back, then went inside, closing the door behind him. The creak of the door sounded like a frog saying “need” and, back at Saint’s house, Joy asked Saint who the man with the frog door was.
“Aba,” Saint said. “Door talk more than he do.”
“Why doesn’t he speak?” Joy asked.
Saint wandered toward a task she didn’t have to do.
Joy visited Aba’s house every day to nod and hear what his door had to say. One day the hinges creaked and she heard from the metal “please.” She went to the market, bought a few apples, and left the basket at the front door. The next day, the hinges said “leave,” and Joy made sure not to stick around any longer. The following day, the hinges said “Saint,” and the next day, the hinges ached out another word: “now.” From then on, the creaking was just creaking and eventually Aba stopped waiting at the door. It took Joy a week more to realize that the words weren’t meant to be heard alone but together, and Aba telling her through the throat of his rusty hinges to leave Saint’s house worried Joy enough to end what she read as the still-standing silence between herself and Frances.
When she mentioned the tension between them, Frances looked offended. “I was done with it after I said what I had to say. You the one moping around for a month and a half,” Frances said, and offered her a spoonful of apple cobbler. Joy sighed and let Frances feed her. They were sitting on Frances’s bed and the snow-bright day entered through the window. “Saint made it.”
A bolt of lightning entered Joy’s mind. “It’s been a month and a half, already,” she said. “How could that be? What have we been doing all this time?” She licked her lips and shook her head when Frances offered another bite of cobbler. How did so much time get away from them? And Frances, oblivious or unconcerned, said nothing about it; Frances, whose obsession with the past made her suspicious of the present and in sublime awe of the future.
Joy wondered what, in the first place, made her stay. This was Frances’s adventure after all, and the tether that tugged Frances from New Orleans to Ours had no interest in tugging Joy as well. She had wanted to leave this place of unpeaceful quiet but to go where, and upon going, how would she survive the two wildernesses that awaited her: the unfamiliar Missouri hills and the dense hunger of her need to kill?
With her only family dead, Frances, her only friend, was all she had left and suddenly to the point of abuse: shepherded off, haunted by the image of her once-guardians propped up like puppets on the couch, not only did she not get the chance to bury Eloise and Amelia, she also never got the chance to mourn. So, the two dead women sat in limbo, waiting on her to call their names, to cry out, so that her heart could finally attend to their absence.
It didn’t frighten her that a month and a half had passed so quickly. It frightened her that all that time had passed without her having broken down. When the floodwaters would come, she knew that after all this time they would nearly drown her. It was because Joy hadn’t mourned that she felt fastened to this pilgrimage, as though knowing eventually the dam of her grief would rupture, requiring someone to sit close by and make sure she didn’t rupture with it. She feared being alone, not knowing when the time would come, so remained near to her only living anchor to the world: Frances.
“We’ll stay for two weeks. No longer. It shouldn’t take no longer than that,” Frances had said when they first arrived. But now Frances had fallen into impenetrable distraction. Joy knew how long Frances had been following the tether’s pull all over the South and some of the North, too. Resistant though understanding, Joy didn’t pressure Frances to abandon discovering the point of her journey, seeing that it had something to do with the woman downstairs whose welcome felt to Joy more like spying. She looked over Frances with skepticism. She saw Frances, but it seemed Frances had left her body.
“You all right?” Joy asked. Frances yawned and nodded. “What do you think of Saint?”
“I think there’s a lot to know that we don’t know. Not sure when she gone tell us, but for now I’m grateful that she’s taking care of us.”
“Why here? Why we stop here?”
“Where else?”
“Was she the one pulling at your heart all this time? Did she pull you into this place that only you could see?”
Frances shook her head. “Spirits guided me here. That pulling could be her needing me and our ancestors helping me get to her.” She paused, then said, “Could be me pulling myself where I’m supposed to be.”
“You can’t pull yourself when you’re only on one side.”
Frances laughed. “Spirit world can make anything happen.”
“I’m asking why the spirits guided you here.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. But I know this is where I need to be.”
Joy watched her eat the cobbler like a child and wanted to pop her in the eye. Frances’s movements were slothful. Her thinking not as sharp. She seemed giddy but not happy. And the more Joy thought about it, the more she realized that Frances hadn’t gone into town with her the entire time. She had thought it was because Frances was angry, but with that revealed as untrue, why had the person who carried her exhausted body into a lifeless cabin—making a fire, leaving her food and water—and who feared Joy would take anything as a weapon and kill without thinking, not walk with her in an unknown place full of unknown people? It was all too uncharacteristic, a mind tampered with, or something worse. She left for town and Frances retreated into sleep.
Joy passed Saint sweeping dust out the front door. The twins were in the kitchen banging on pots for only God knows why. Joy used the noise to ignore Saint and pretend she didn’t hear her asking if she were heading to Ours. Joy shouted goodbye over the cacophony and with her basket hanging from the hinge of her bent elbow, she went straight to Aba’s, knocked on his door, and waited. It took a long time for him to come out and when he opened the door, it creaked “what” in a long, trebly whine.
She needed help with something out at Saint’s, she said. The moment the words left her lips, Aba attempted to close the door in her face, but she placed her arm in the opening. The door closed hard on her forearm. Aba snatched open the door, eye to eye with Joy. The hinges cried out “why,” as the door opened, and Joy showed no signs of pain.
“You want to help me. Do not act unkindly. You might as well help.” Truth was, Joy thought the man, in his decrepit state, looked just as magical and ornery as Saint and that look alone led her to believe that he also carried as much knowledge about conjure as anyone in town.
He didn’t let Joy inside, so she stood out in the cold on the other side of the threshold while she described the emanations from the house when Frances entered and Frances’s stupefaction and isolation. Aba’s face creased with panic while she talked.
“No help,” he creaked when she finished, “but to leave.” She asked why he couldn’t speak. Aba looked at the floor as he closed the door between them. The hinges replied, “Guess.”
[4]
Usually discerning to a fault, Joy was so distracted by figuring out what was wrong with Frances that she didn’t notice people watching her. Each time she stopped by Aba’s, the town went stationary around her, its clockwork habits jammed by her visiting the man who had no more words after burning down Saint’s house. Did she know he had done that? Surely, Saint had told her. She must have. They also noticed how the naked branches of the large weeds in front of his house leant in a little toward Joy when she visited. ‘Both must have surely lost they mind,’ some thought, while others believed the leaning branches and the squeaking door were both a token for something. For what, who could tell so soon? But a token for sure.
Their odd behavior caught Franklin’s attention as he made his way to Mr. Wife’s. He remembered dropping off Joy and the man she accompanied over a month ago at Creek’s Bridge and thought it nice to see her visiting town to get to know folks. But seemed like she only took interest in Aba, who had stopped picking berries years ago and let his porch that once doubled as a fruit market fall prey to spiderwebs. How could he haggle over fruit with no voice to negotiate and charm his way into the best sell?
Mr. Wife used to sit with him on the porch, but that, too, stopped soon after Saint reappeared carrying all-of-a-sudden twins on her bosom. Mr. Wife would come knocking on Aba’s door while Aba sat somewhere in the house ignoring him. After a week of being disregarded, Mr. Wife stopped trying.
“All it took was a week?” Franklin had asked, but Mr. Wife wasn’t about to take another loss in stride. “Lost my woman, almost lost my son; it seems that way to me with all these snakes crawling about. Lost my friend. Who else want to make me mayor of losses? You?” Mr. Wife said, and Franklin shook his head and changed the subject. This was when the boys were still boys. Now, eight years later, Franklin wondered again if Mr. Wife had given up too soon while he himself never took to Aba’s porch to keep the man company. Though he didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite, he did feel a gnawing in his gut for which he had no name when he walked by Joy as she stood in the cold, speaking to a no-talking man.
Franklin wanted peers. Restless for male energy, he took to the roads to find folks to play a little bid whist for a sip of whiskey, but most of the men had grown as old as or older than him and were nestled up with the remainder of their lives, while the married men raised families, distracted by small feet and cries for milk.
Some of the older boys were off in the woods looking for winter game or up in Delacroix finishing last-minute work before the weather got too bad for travel. Franklin reminisced on days when the younger men stopped by his porch to talk and wondered when it was that they had all decided he was too old to drink with. As years passed, his life wisdom bored those who had been discovering their own adulthood: learning the scent of a lover intoxicated more than whiskey and learning how to let the burn of whiskey train them into pleasure. Franklin wanted to impart values of manhood and play games, something denied him in his own childhood, but the young men of Ours lived a life without much wonder or wander, and their restlessness demanded quenching. Ours’s isolation had intensified their longing, and though sometimes the young men would come seeking advice or just to check in on Franklin, never did they stay long, which left room for the dead fox boy of his past to roll from the depths of his memory and stare at him from a near distance. He would blink and the ghastly image would roll into itself like a curl of smoke and vanish.
Franklin avoided the young boys completely, swallowed lumps in his throat when he heard their bright voices. He kept his head low and waved without proper acknowledgment, his heart pounding, his mind cloudy with a fear that made his eyes throb. No, he would be play uncle no more, Luther-Philip the first and last of that improvisational family that, had it lasted beyond its time, would’ve flattened beneath the weight of his history as the image of the dead fox boy slowly and eventually took over the faces of the boys that came near him.
He thought of the company of one man he had met in the forest and mistook for a deer. Had he been hunting, he might’ve killed him, the man’s naked skin brown and shiny as a wet doe’s. But that meeting happened over a year ago, and the shame of returning to those piercing eyes, those hands hard from carpentry, and that mouth that he decided to abandon because in it he found no future, kept him immured in Ours.
The one man in Ours he could’ve been close to, Aba, he never really spoke to and had no idea why. They weren’t close in age, Aba either in or nearing his sixties, and Franklin believing he was somewhere in his late forties by now. But Aba reminded Franklin of the best parts of his father. This disarmed him, he who had accumulated much armor yet hid the hiding to make peace with himself and those around him. Truth was, men frightened Franklin, but over the years he had seen what brotherhood could look like by watching how the men in Ours handled each other. The longer he witnessed this, the more he wanted to take part, though his body quaked with fear. ‘Maybe that’s why they stopped coming by like they did,’ Franklin thought, believing they saw his hands trembling and thought him strange.
What he had known of men was violence so careless it ruined a whole crop of boys. But Franklin’s father, particularly after Franklin had seen a dead body up close, was kind to him till the end of his life. Franklin only wished that his father had stepped in and stopped what those men did to him, to stop the fight so the boy who cared for foxes wouldn’t have been killed. Maybe then his yearning for and dread of those who should’ve been his brothers wouldn’t overpower him.
Aba was kind to the boys, sweet to the women, and minded his business unless absolutely needed. Franklin had witnessed how he broke up fistfights, then fed the fighters on his porch while telling them cuss-filled stories that made no sense. Yes, Franklin should’ve gone to the man earlier on because now Aba had stopped speaking altogether. It seemed like such a waste. Heading to visit Mr. Wife, he began to feel angry and the new pain in his head swelled.
When he made it to Mr. Wife’s, the place reeked of iron and musk. “Open the damn windows,” he said to Mr. Wife, who begrudgingly did as he was told, then went back to work on a pound cake. “Nothing worse than a house full of menfolk,” Franklin said, loud enough for Luther-Philip and Justice to hear, both sitting off to the side: Justice reading an old Delacroix newspaper while Luther-Philip scrubbed a pair of pants with soap in a tin tub. Franklin wanted them to know that they needed their own. Their own house, horse, business (to mind), and women. He believed more fiercely each day that Mr. Wife could move on and find for himself a new wife if he had no more children to raise. Justice and Luther-Philip, one seventeen and the other eighteen, should’ve been gone out the house years ago, married or making bed and working some job somewhere, perhaps for Franklin, who desperately needed repairs that he couldn’t do alone and that Thylias wasn’t interested in doing.
“Mind yours, Franklin, and I’ll mind mine,” Mr. Wife said. “If you had some your own, you wouldn’t be so worried over this way.” He laughed.
Franklin scowled, lingered a bit, said it smelled like menfolk who needed to get married, then headed on out, back to his unwanted solitude where the voices of snickering boys panicked him into a brisk escape.
Years ago, after Mr. Wife had started bathing again but before Justice moved in, the house had another smell that needed handling. The back room where Mr. Wife, Mrs. Wife, and Luther-Philip had slept still smelled like Mrs. Wife. Mr. Wife smelled it, too, and no matter how much he washed the floor with that tiny bottle of oil Saint had given him, the scent of his dead wife refused to leave.
He installed three windows in that room and painted over them so no one could look in or out while they were shut. He only wanted to release his dead wife completely from the house with a breeze, not remove his much-wanted privacy, but she insisted on staying and chased the wind out instead of leaving. It took Franklin to intervene yet again on behalf of the town and yet again over something not smelling quite right in the Wife home.
“You need to go to your woman’s grave and cry. If you don’t, she never find rest. Just watch. You wake up one morning and she cozy on your porch. Then how you gone get her back in the ground?” he said, and Mr. Wife, that very day, visited the small cemetery and noticed the smell strengthened the closer he got to the grave. What he found alarmed him. Mrs. Wife’s hand reached straight up from the earth and perfumed the air with rot and a flowery sweetness. The salt had not stopped her from coming back and his unspoken grief for her broke the hold the afterlife had on her. Mr. Wife sat there all night, crying and reminiscing to Mrs. Wife’s hand until it returned into the ground, taking the smell with it.
A decade after, Mr. Wife was mostly a man freed from his mourning but who, according to Franklin, had been kept hostage by two boy-men who didn’t have sense enough to go be full men. Franklin could see if they were daughters, him believing women were more subject to harm from the elements than any man. Hence him treating Thylias like he would a boy as if to inoculate her from what he believed were the weaknesses of her sex, though that didn’t appease him completely and, in his eyes, had made her irrevocably unmarriable. Had he asked her, Thylias would’ve told him that she didn’t ever want to marry, only to remain in their earned peace. Contrary to Franklin’s belief, men had asked to court her, and she rejected them all to maintain mental clarity and retreat. Their stability together spoiled her for marriage more than anything else.
Franklin returned to the bakery house a few days later and asked, “What you two do all day?” to Luther-Philip and Justice. Justice said reading and Luther-Philip said he had been cleaning everybody clothes, the same as they had been the last time he had visited. ‘Dear Lord,’ Franklin thought, ‘they done made Luther-Philip the new wife.’ He didn’t know that they took turns cleaning each other’s clothes and this just so happened to be Luther-Philip’s week.
When Franklin pulled Mr. Wife into the back room, closed the door, and confronted him about the “boy-wife,” Mr. Wife laughed in his face. “Nothing funny about it,” Franklin said, and the gravity of his concern moved Mr. Wife from awkward humor to patient warning.
“Not in this house. I open the window when you say so. I listen to everything you had to say but not about my boys,” Mr. Wife said. He spoke louder than he had wanted to. In the other room, Luther-Philip smiled. Justice folded the newspaper.
“You letting them run you, Mr.”
“And you trying to run me. What sense you make? You want me ran or not?”
“We know each other, back-of-the-hand know. Skin close. We both men here.”
“Which is why you know better than anybody not to tell a man about his house.”
“Now listen—”
Mr. Wife placed his hand on Franklin’s shoulders and said, “No. You said what you think needed saying and I respect you for that gift. But that’s enough.”
“You just gone let them sit around and live under you like pigs?”
“You watch your mouth, Franklin. Not long ago you was a pig on a plantation.”
“Worked harder as a slave than these boys do as free.”
“You better watch your damn mouth,” Mr. Wife said, his finger in Franklin’s face. “If they want to sit under a tree and pleasure they self all damn day, then that’s just what the hell they gone do. They gone do with they freedom what they want.”
Franklin smacked Mr. Wife’s hand away. “They both gone play wife for you, Mr.?” he said.
Had there not been any air in the room, Mr. Wife wouldn’t have noticed. He had been holding his breath. His body tightened. He was getting ready.
The dim light coming through the open windows hardly reached them. A draft coursed through the room, but Mr. Wife felt hot and when he finally unclenched his fists, he said, “I reckon Thylias mighty good, the way she hold that rifle.” He smiled and Franklin hit Mr. Wife square in the jaw, knocking the man onto the floor. Mr. Wife laughed. “You the one want the company of men so bad,” he said, holding his jaw. “Oowee! What make you so better being all your life married-like to your damn play-daughter but always looking for men to be up under.” He held his chest and cackled when Franklin spat at his feet and kicked him in the shin, all while Franklin stormed out of the house and as Justice held a rag stuffed with packed snow on Mr. Wife’s cheek.
Justice said he would kill Franklin, and Mr. Wife cackled once more.
“He a dollar there already,” Mr. Wife said. “That punch had the last of his life in it.”
A week earlier, on an evening too warm for the season, Luther-Philip and Justice took one of their trips to the lake. They had fallen into the habit of not carrying lanterns, having learned the land so well they threaded through the bushes better than the dark itself.
Upon reaching the water, Luther-Philip undressed and jumped in. Justice took off his shoes and sat off to the side, letting the small waves chill the heels of his feet. He watched Luther-Philip take on the sunlight with the same shimmer as the lake water and nearly lost him when the sun halved low behind the bladed treetops across the way. The dipping sunlight carried with it all manner of sound, so a brief hush fell over the sunset-rusted water. Only the lake gulping down Luther-Philip’s body sang in Justice’s ears, until the night creatures burst into chorus.
The water was too cold for Justice, but Luther-Philip liked it just as he did during the warmer months. He swam up to Justice and splashed him. Justice tried to hide behind his arm, but Luther-Philip kept at it. His laughter cut through the dark, laughter nearly indistinguishable from the plashes, except for the blade-tipped apex of his voice when the laughter got good to him.
“Get in, Justice. Water’s good as always,” Luther-Philip said, and splashed Justice again, but Justice just observed what little he could make out of his friend, for the near-gone sun made Luther-Philip into a lean silhouette against the shadowy water. It took the moon’s and stars’ slow eruption for Luther-Philip’s face to have its features returned to it just enough to reveal to Justice that his own face could also be seen, so he looked away, but Luther-Philip had already caught that last glimmer of sadness.
Luther-Philip waded out of the water and sat dripping wet next to Justice. It had been this way for a few nights, where an unnatural silence abused the curated silence between them. Justice tossed Luther-Philip a rag to dry off with, but Luther-Philip let the jewels of water slide down his taut skin illuminated beneath the bold full moon. At eighteen, Luther-Philip’s leanness filled in with enough muscle to not think him unfed and the furious and sudden curves of his body made him appear hard to the touch, even in the dark that muted the edges of things, made errors of lines and soft cream of hard stones.
The night, too, had a way with Justice, who couldn’t hide his bulk, which he carried with an ambling shame. He pivoted frequently to avoid colliding into others, paused, lifted himself up to get his chest and stomach out of the way of passersby, and treaded with a keen aptitude for invisibility. But with Luther-Philip, he spilled out of his body and allowed himself to fill in whatever space he wanted. He swiped cold sweat from his brow, he gnashed his teeth against short gusts of wind, he stretched his arms above his head and refused to carry his weight, which made him less agile but frighteningly fast. So fast that Luther-Philip lost his breath when Justice pulled him into his lap and embraced him.
“You gone get sick,” Justice said, and, grabbing the rag, began drying off Luther-Philip’s head. He dug in his ears, twisting the rag inside the damp canals. He wiped behind the ears, then asked Luther-Philip to lean forward so that he could dry off his back. Justice wiped each spine knob individually before wiping under the shoulder blades. It was like polishing stone, only the shine went away too soon.
Justice passed Luther-Philip the rag and told him to dry off his legs. Luther-Philip turned around in Justice’s lap and laid out. His back arched across Justice’s thigh and his left arm dangled onto the muddy bay, making a living pietà of himself and Justice. Justice laughed and held Luther-Philip up with his arm and dried his legs for him.
Justice froze when he heard a rustle in the bushes behind them. Luther-Philip asked what was wrong and Justice covered Luther-Philip’s mouth with his hand. They stayed that way for a while until Luther-Philip fell asleep and started to snore in Justice’s arms. Justice turned toward the thick bushes behind them, but he couldn’t decipher the darkness. He tightened his hold on Luther-Philip. He stared, listened, and waited.
Now, Justice watched Mr. Wife hold the snow-cold towel to his own face to relieve the swelling from Franklin’s punch. Justice thought back to that night alone with Luther-Philip at the lake and how from then on, Mr. Wife made sure to keep the aspiring suitors at bay by asking the women to make their purchases so that others could get in. “Line getting long,” Mr. Wife said, grinning though his eyes calcified against any compassion. Justice remembered and wanted to hide what to him was an unbearable vulnerability, to be seen without knowing one has seen you.
While Luther-Philip paced away his anger against Franklin outside, Justice asked, “How you keep people from leaving, sir?”
“Now where this come from? I’m bruised, not dying,” Mr. Wife said.
“It come to me just now.”
“You don’t keep nobody. Ain’t no masters left on this earth, boy. If somebody want to go, you can’t keep them from going,” Mr. Wife said.
“What if you end up with nobody else?”
“You always have yourself.”
“I can’t touch myself,” Justice said.
Mr. Wife dabbed his cheek. “Numb,” he said. “Can’t feel the left side of my face at all.”
“You held it there a mighty long time.”
“I did. Can’t hold nothing for too long,” Mr. Wife said, and looked at Justice.
“How long is too long, sir?”
“When it start hurting, the first sign. When you don’t feel nothing, the second,” Mr. Wife said, then asked, “Why you rubbing your thigh, son? Something bit you?”
Justice had been rubbing near the branded E without knowing it. He had no need to hold on to that letter; it did all the holding on needed. He hadn’t told Mr. Wife about what his parents put on him, and Luther-Philip only knew because they went swimming. The dark lake that was his heart trembled. He felt a bit of freezing wind rise from the black water’s surface and pour into his chest. Without thinking, he said “I got a E on me, sir.”
“What you say you got?” Mr. Wife said, shifting the wet towel on his face.
“A E. On my leg.”
Mr. Wife chuckled. “I don’t know your meaning, Justice.” Mr. Wife dipped himself and Justice some water from a nearby bucket. “Here.”
Justice drank the water and sat the cup on the floor. “Luther-Philip seen it. The E. He say I don’t need it but I got it. More like it need me.”
“What E, boy?”
Justice’s lips trembled. “It’s on my leg. It’s so my people could find me in the papers. That’s why I read the papers so much. To see if people do be finding people that way.”
“The papers?” Mr. Wife’s body slumped into itself. He kept his narrowing eyes trained on Justice, who didn’t look away. “Show me,” he said. “Show me what they did to you, son.”
Justice pulled down his pants and hid his privates with his hand. He turned out his left leg and revealed the E burnt into his skin. Mr. Wife made a sound that carried all of history. Pain unfolding pain. A primordial echo of the first hurt finally crawling its way back. And each time Justice thought the pain had finished unfolding, more petals opened from Mr. Wife’s mouth until the pain was in full bloom. After the sound ended, the tears began.
Mr. Wife studied Justice’s face, then examined the brand. He tried harder to speak. Shook his head. He narrowed his eyes to push away the tears, incapable of seeing anything else, not even his own house, his own furniture in it, or the young man standing before him tagged like the slave he had never been, like cattle. The E branded on Justice’s leg had branded Mr. Wife’s mind. How had he missed that ugly scar for all these years? How did Justice hide it so well? And, of course, his damn parents burnt it inside his thigh and not on the outside where it would be most useful if ever needed. Even they knew to be ashamed of branding their boy, so hid it instead of simply not doing it.
Something inside Mr. Wife broke free, but this freedom he couldn’t celebrate. This dead flesh rising up from a living body was too much, just too much.
As Mr. Wife cried and cussed, Justice knew that his all-along suspicions about his condition were right. What his family did to him shouldn’t have been done. He raised his pants.
Mr. Wife stood and threw the chair he was sitting on against the wall. He smashed another chair into the table. He smashed the cake resting on another long table by the oven. He smashed it with his fists and threw the sweet ruin to the floor. Justice turned away. Another chair went flying. Justice shouted, “It don’t hurt,” and Mr. Wife, mid-swing of an iron poker toward the oven, stopped. “It don’t hurt no more, sir,” Justice said.
Mr. Wife dropped the poker. The smell of cake dazzled the air. Pieces of broken chairs, a splintered wooden bowl, dinted tin cups, an upended bag of flour, a table cracked in the center, the old Delacroix newspaper ripped—everything unmade by his hostility, his grief for the living. And though he could no longer see Justice’s gnarled E he remembered as though the image had been burned into his own mind and rested up against images of bags of rice, a stable of horses, fresh-carved bowls, flour waiting to be cupped and measured, loaves of bread handled more delicately than any body, butter, eggs, blocks of ice, a stream of satin, a page of silk, a hill of beans, and a shovel full of cow shit ready for the field. It became another object in the ledger of his memory, priced and allocated no importance more than its function: to feed, to keep warm, to get the job done, to make everything but itself prosper. ‘No,’ he thought. ‘You wrong about it not hurting no more.’ Mr. Wife could smell the smoke rising from that E from where he stood—feet away from the boy he called his own but knew nothing about, not even that he had an insignia branded into his left inner thigh, so what kind of parent was he to Justice if he knew and recalled the time of each bruise’s conception on Luther-Philip’s body but none belonging to Justice?
He closed the space between himself and Justice and embraced him. “You free,” he said. Mr. Wife felt stirring in him another hit of grief, poignant to the point of sending him into a second tirade from which there could be no return. ‘What is freedom?’ he thought. ‘What is this shit?’ He rubbed Justice’s head, just a bit higher than his own, and feeling the flesh of him—the meat and the fat and the warmth—against his own body made him feel sick.
When he released Justice, he looked into the boy’s face, hoping that the meat would become a body again, someone returning from the something that he never had the mind to make the boy into, not before seeing the brand. Luckily, Justice’s eyes brought his own selfhood back to Mr. Wife’s mind. He squeezed the boy’s shoulders and said, “You free,” looking at his reflection in that big pool of Justice’s dark brown eyes. Mr. Wife swam to the pool’s bottom, got lost in the dark. ‘If I can just look in his eyes,’ Mr. Wife thought, ‘if I can just see myself always in his eyes, I’ll know that he seeing me back. We each other to each other. Let this be the freedom between us.’