IN THE END, WE—THENA, Sophia, young Carrie, and myself—were all that was stable at Lockless. Powers of blood bound us. Sophia was Nathaniel’s chosen, and Carrie was her daughter. I was my father’s son, and as for Thena, well, to my father, she was the symbol of a bygone era. He had sold her children, an act that, in his mind, was a turn in the road that marked the end of the Virginia he knew. He never quite said this, but my father avoided saying too much to Thena, and if he was walking the property and saw her coming, he would turn the other way. I think now that this was his ambition for her laundry runs, to somehow assuage the guilt of selling a woman’s children on the racetrack.
Guilt or not, it saved Thena, and together, in those gray days, the four of us formed a kind of unit. We fell into a kind of routine. We took our meals together. After, I would see to my father, and then walk Sophia and Caroline back to their quarters down in the Street. One night I was seeing them home and Sophia said, speaking of Thena, “You know she is getting old.”
“She is,” I said.
“It is a hard life, Hi, a hard life on a woman—the laundry, the hauling, the rendering, the lye. I help out as I can, but it is hard. I am glad you came back. She need a break. Tell her sit tight tomorrow. You and me, we can handle the washing. And we’ll do the run on Monday too.”
When I got back, I told Thena our plan. She looked at me and gave some manner of protest, relenting only after insisting on looking after Caroline while we worked. The next day was Sunday. Corrine was coming in to take my father off to church. With Hawkins attending them both, I could take up the extra labor. That night, I lay in bed thinking of Thena and her plans. She still held out the hope of laundry money buying the last of her days in freedom. I held not to her plan but to my own, the plan of the Underground. Winter was upon us, the nights growing longer. I thought of Kessiah and how her face would look when she found her mother was delivered, and I thought, even then, that I saw in that look not just the fulfillment of a promise, but the healing of some ancient wound in me.
The washing was not easy work. We met in the early morning, with the sky still black and illuminated by the pin-prick of stars and the sliver of moon. We spent the first hour drawing up water from the well and filling our cauldrons. Then, while I gathered wood and got the fires going, Sophia separated the garments and searched for small tears. Then she delivered those few to Thena, whom we were not wholly successful in keeping from work, for darning. With the fires going and the black cauldrons heating, we held up the garments and bedding and beat the soiling out of them. While Sophia finished the beating, I carried three large washing tubs out from the Warrens to the side of the house, where we were heating the water. The stars had now faded and I could see the pale sliver of moon dissolving into the dark blue of those last small hours. When the tubs were in place, together, with our work gloves on, we lifted the cauldrons and poured the hot water. And then for the next few hours we scrubbed, rinsed, and wrung, and then scrubbed, rinsed, and wrung twice more.
We finished long after sunset. After hanging all the clothes, we walked over to the gazebo, as we had done in what seemed to me a lifetime ago. Our arms and backs were sore. Our hands were raw. We sat there in the silence of things for twenty minutes. And then walked back to eat with Thena.
“Not so easy,” she said, and our exhausted silence was the loudest affirmation imaginable. Afterward, I walked Sophia down to the Street, and lingered as she washed and dressed Caroline for bed. I stepped outside and knocked my knuckles around the gaps in the filled spaces between the cabin wood. A piece chipped away.
I came back in and said, “Daubing going to pieces here. Thinking I might could go over it one time.”
Sophia was then swaddling the baby’s bottom in cloth, singing softly. She stopped singing and said, “Is she a problem for you?”
I laughed nervously. “Takes some adjusting.”
“So you gonna be adjusting or no?”
“It is my notion,” I said.
I stepped in and sat down on the bed next to Sophia.
“Remember where your notions got us last time,” she said.
“I have not forgot a single thing,” I said. “But what I remember is not the hounds nor what came after. What I remember is you. What I remember is being tied to that fence, how I felt right ready to die, but when I looked over, I saw not an inch of dying in you—no matter what Georgie had done to us.”
“Georgie,” she said. At the mention of his name, I saw a look of rage. “He was gone when I got back here. Good for him he was, too. I cannot tell you of the vile and vengeful thoughts I put upon that man.”
“Maybe for the best, then,” I said.
“For him,” she said. “For him.”
We were quiet for a while. Sophia was holding Caroline over her shoulder now, gently rubbing her back.
“Hiram,” she said. “Why did you go away?”
“Wasn’t no ‘go’ about it. They up and carried me off,” I said. “You seen it.”
“Just like that, huh?” she said. “Carried you off?”
“You know how it happen,” I said. “We were not the first. Hounds catch you out there. Carry you off.”
“Well, I got this feeling that there was more to it. Things that maybe you cannot say, things that are not meant to be spoke about. Maybe it was you being Walker-kin. But that don’t feel like all of it, for I know that men down here, men who believe in the Task like Howell Walker do, why, they will sell their kin in a second, if only to no longer have to gaze upon the fruit of their sinful ways.”
“But I am Tasked,” I said. “Sure as you are Tasked. Blood can’t change that. It’s just as simple as it look. Corrine had a need. Howell felt bad about Maynard dying and sent me for consolation. Fact that we had run made it even easier.”
“Well, that is the other part. While you was gone, I seen my share of Corrine—more than I have seen of Nathaniel, even. She come down here every few weeks or so. And I do not know why she would have reason to see me. And I do not know why I myself wasn’t sent Natchez-way. Why are we here, Hiram? Why do we remain?”
“Seem like a question for Nathaniel.”
“Hi,” she said, “I don’t think he even know we ran. Times I have seen him since, and it has not been very often, he has not bothered a mention.”
“I don’t know. I ain’t in nobody’s heads.”
“I ain’t saying you are.”
“Yeah. Well, you are always saying something.”
She slapped me on the shoulder with her free hand and frowned. It was quiet between us for some long moments. I was thinking of Corrine, and why she would feel a need to look in on Sophia. I was wondering about what I had been told. And then I looked over to Sophia, who now had Carrie on her lap and was singing to her something soft and soothing. Baby Caroline was batting at the air, fighting sleep, fighting her own eyes.
For a moment I was back in Philadelphia, back with Mars, and I remembered how he opened himself to me, how the whole White family opened themselves and what that meant for me, how Bland had opened himself to me, how his words had freed me from the guilt of Maynard’s dying. And I felt now that I owed some of that to Sophia.
“I know a child ain’t only a joyful thing. I seen it. But so often I have seen women who would not wish a child upon themselves, still and all, forming their whole life around it. And I see you have formed your life around this young’un, formed your life around her before she even came. You would run for her. You would kill for her. I see how you look at the girl now, and I remember. I remember what you told me. ‘It’s coming, Hiram,’ you said. ‘And I will watch as my daughter is taken in, as I was taken in.’ None can say it was not said. And though I remember everything, I cannot say I always hear it. But I hear you now, and I hear much more.
“And I know that men put such terrible and wretched things upon a child brought to them who ain’t they blood. Mayhaps I’d be one of them men. Mayhaps I’d be so far in my own regard, in my own wrath and hate, that I…” I shook my head. “I am saying that she ain’t no problem, and you ain’t no problem, I am the problem.” And I paused here for a moment and Sophia squeezed my hand.
“I am saying that I knew who her daddy was, almost the moment I saw her. It was the rules. I come back and see you here with this baby Caroline, who is not blood…”
And I swear at this moment, it was as if baby Caroline could hear my words, for she looked over and reached a hand toward me. And I slipped my hand out from under Sophia’s and reached toward the baby, who took my small finger in her grip.
“ ’Cept, she is my blood,” I said. “High yella like me, with green-gray eyes like mine—but not only mine. These are Walker eyes and that is Walker hair. Goes back to the earliest one, for I have seen it noted in all descriptions of him in the local Elm County history.
“And it is the funniest thing. Because them green-gray eyes skipped Maynard. But they have arisen most prominently in Caroline, baby Caroline.
“And there is pain in that. Ain’t clean. It’s muck. I have told other men the same, even though I must now struggle to take my own medicine. I want you to know what I have seen, the men I have known since I have gone. The men who have had to decide what they love more, the everything, lovely and mean, right in front of them, or their own wrath and regard. And I choose the muck of this world, Sophia. I choose the everything.”
There were tears now in her eyes.
“Can I hold her?” I asked.
And she laughed through her tears and said, “Careful. She might well carry you off.”
Then she smiled and pulled baby Caroline up off her lap and, cupping her backside in one hand and shoulders in the other, presented her to me. And I saw baby Caroline look up with those green-grays and that same infant obsession. I reached out, trying to do my best imitation of Sophia, putting my hands directly under hers and then slipping them out. And I pulled the girl close to me until her head sat in the crook of my elbow. And when I felt her settle in, and she did not cry or wail, when I felt the warm muck of her in my arms, I thought of my father, and how he had never held me like this, not in symbol or in fact. And I remembered how I had, for all my youth, chased him, in search of this moment. And I thought of the woman who had given that moment to me, because that is what everyone told me, that my mother loved me more than anything, that she formed her life around me, until she was ripped away, my mother, whom I could not remember.
With Lockless hollowing itself out, with the Warrens all haunted and gray, and that dying season now folding into winter, Caroline was a light upon our world. It was Thena, with no one else there and willing, who had midwifed Carrie, and so, out of that feeling, Thena would at times care for the baby herself, to spell Sophia. That she did that following Sunday, when I was to repair the daubing on Sophia’s cabin. I worked for about an hour and then stepped inside. Sophia had started a fire. She was all bundled up and sat in front of the fireplace holding her hands toward it.
She looked at me and said, “You ain’t cold?”
“I am,” I said. “Can’t you tell?” And I put my hands on her cheeks and reached down to her neck. She laughed and shrieked, “Boy, stop!”
I chased her out of the cabin and into the Street for a few minutes until we collapsed in laughter onto the ground.
“All right, I really am cold now,” I said.
“I’m trying to tell you,” she said.
We went inside and sat by the fire. “Day like this,” she said, “could sure use me a demijohn. My Carolina Mercury, I tell you, he used to keep his share.” Then she looked at me and said, “Forgive me, Hi, I do not mean to speak of old things.”
“To be mine, can’t be mine,” I said. “Besides, give me an idea. Just wait right here.”
I walked back up to the house and into the Warrens. I stopped past Thena’s room and saw the door cracked open, and looking in I saw that Caroline was asleep on Thena’s bosom, much as Kessiah had told me she would be in days past. I walked into my room and took the bottle of rum that Mars had given me on my departure. When I got back, Sophia was sitting there with her hands underneath their opposite arms, and when I showed her the bottle she smiled and said, “I know there is something with you, something about the places you been.”
I opened the bottle and she said, “You ain’t the same man who left. You can try as you might to fool me, but you ain’t the same, I can see it, Hi. Can’t hide from me.”
I passed her the bottle and she took it to her mouth and tilted her head back as if trying to catch rain in her face, and then drank. “Ooh,” she said, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Yeah, you been some places.”
“But I am here now,” I said, and took a drink. “And besides, what about you?”
“What about me?” she said. “What you wanna know? I shall lay it out all before you.”
I took another drink, then sat the bottle on the ground.
“What happened?” I asked. “What happened after that night they had us out there?”
“Huh,” she said. “Well, they kept me pinned in that jail, much as I assume they pinned you. And I knew I was done, I tell you. Natchez calling, Natchez. And a girl like me, baby or no, I knew I would be put right out to fancy. I was right terrified, I tell you. I know I tried to be strong that night out there, Hi, and I was because I had you, and I felt I had you to worry for, and long as I had that, wasn’t much time for thinking of my own worries.
“But that day the hounds pinned me in that jail, it all hit me, all the evil that was bout to come down on me. Wanted to cry, but I knew I had to be strong. I just talk to my Caroline, that whole time. Just talk to her, and I am telling you, she soothed me. Like I felt myself to no longer be so alone. It’s like you say, I did not ask for her, but in that moment I was so happy to have her even though she was but a small thing blooming in me.
“And I think that was the moment when I became a mother to her. I was angry at what that man, Nathaniel, had done to me. What he had put upon me. And though I am thankful for her, I will never be thankful to him. Caroline belongs to me and my God. I named her for my lost home, for my Carolina, the land from which I was stripped by no doing of my own. And that is the whole of it—in that jail, with the knife of Natchez at my throat, Caroline—my home—she saved me.”
I handed her the bottle and she took another drink, shivered, and said, “Mmmm.” She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. And was silent for a moment and I just sat there watching her in this silence. When she turned back to pass the demijohn to me, I felt that she looked different, as though the very texture of her story had somehow been etched into her face.
“But that’s not really the whole of it,” she said. “Late that night, same night, I was drifting off to sleep, huddled in the corner of the jail, rats scurrying around, cold drafty air blowing in, and I look up and see a shadow looking in on me. And then the shadow walk away for a few, and I am wondering if this is some kind of dream. But then the shadow come back with one of the hounds, who opens the door to my jail and he say, ‘Get on.’
“Ain’t got to say it again, you know? So I get up and then I see that it ain’t no shadow at all. It is Corrine Quinn in her mourning clothes. And when I walked outside, her chaise was there with her people. They sat me in the back with her and she told me she knew what I was headed for, what was coming, should Nathaniel hear of my run. But he really ain’t need to hear nothing, she was sure of it. Nobody needed to know. I could go back to everything as it was before. Onliest thing she ask is, if she could stop down to the Street every now and again and speak to me.”
“Speak to you about what?” I asked.
“Mostly things down here,” Sophia said. “Like I tell you, she stop in now and again and ask about who still here and who gone Natchez-way. Always struck me as curious, you know. But after Caroline come, my only desire was to keep that baby safe. I ain’t care about much else.
“But I did ask her about you,” Sophia said. She put her arm around mine as she said this. “I asked her what they would do with you. She told me not to worry. You’d been gone a spell, but you would return. You would come back.
“Can’t say I believed her, Hi. You know I have lost so much in my time, and I have found that what’s gone is gone, and that is all there is.
“ ’Cept you. You came back,” she said. And she was looking at me, looking through me, with dagger eyes. I felt the room spinning all around me. “I can hardly believe it, but you have come back. Come back to me.”
I had now stopped thinking. I felt the beams and rafters and daubing of the cabin bend, and with them, the beams and rafters and daubing of the whole world encircle us, enclose us together. All of nature seemed in on it, so that when I tasted the rum of her mouth, it was the sugar of life.
And only then did I understand that I did not really remember everything, that there were things beyond my mother that I had chosen to forget—not pictures, but the feelings behind them. I had forgotten how much I dearly missed Sophia, how much I longed for her; had forgotten those days in Philadelphia, when all I wanted was for Raymond and Otha to leave me be, so that I could be alone with the memory of her, dancing by that large Holiday fire. And I had forgotten the low and deep sickness of longing pushing through the vessels of my body like a train pushing down the track. I had forgotten how I accepted this sickness, like a cough I could not shake, had forgotten the days when, alone, I drew my arms around my stomach and doubled over, feeling loneliness consume me. I loved her, and perhaps knowing, even then, the great danger of such a feeling under the Task, under slavery, and even in the Underground, I had forgotten as much of it as I could, though it had not forgotten me. And now it was here, with us, between us, and when she stroked her hand against my face, when she took my arm in her hands, she did not take it soft, but firm and wanting, and I knew then that all that I felt, all of the longing in me, all the bridled wanting of blind and violent youth, and the low need to vent it, was not solely my own.
Hours later, we were in the loft, staring upwards. Her arm was across my chest, her hand fingering my shoulder as if playing a piano.
“By God, it is you,” she said. “Your hands. Your eyes. Your face.”
It was now way past dark, so much so that I knew morning would soon be upon us, and then the rafters of the world would relax and we would be left in our regular places, and with our regular tasks at Lockless. But some things could not go back, and among them was a new knowledge that I felt upon me, and it was the same knowledge that compelled Otha White, the mania that took hold of him, how he could never truly sleep without Lydia. For the first time, I understood Conduction, understood it as a relay of feeling, assembled from moments so striking that they become real as stone and steel, real as an iron cat roaring down the tracks, chasing blackbirds from the awning.
As I dressed, while Sophia watched from the loft above, I looked at the mantel and saw the toy horse I had retrieved from the home of Georgie Parks, and I swear to you that it almost glowed. Sophia came back down from the loft now and stood behind me with her arms wrapped around my waist, her head on my back, as I studied the wooden horse in my hands.
“Go head,” she said. “Take it. Told you it’s a little soon for her to have such things.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Guess so.”
I turned to Sophia then, with the small wooden horse still in my hand, and one last time, there in the dark, the world drew my lips to hers, and we held each other as if holding to the mast of a ship in a great storm.
“All right,” I said. “Prolly should go.”
“Prolly should,” she said.
“All right,” I said again, and when I walked outside into a different world, I did so backwards to preserve the look of her in those small blue hours, to hold it for as long as I might.
Everything would have been easier had I simply gone back up to the Warrens then and blacked my brogans and wiped myself clean. But this new understanding, this unlocking of old notions, prevailed on me. What I did instead was walk down a path that led me through the darkness to Dumb Silk Road. I now risked the hounds, which even then patrolled these roads for what had to be the last runaways out of a diminished Elm County. But as I walked, I fingered the wooden horse in my hands, and I knew that even if it had been the good years, the hounds could never truly threaten me.
Twenty minutes later, I was back there, back at the river Goose, which appeared not as a river but as a wide black mass stretching out across the land. I walked toward that mass until I could hear the river lapping gently up against its banks. It was cloudy out, so that there was no moon to illuminate anything. But there at the banks, I held up my hand, the same hand in which I held the wooden horse, and I saw the blue light of Conduction glowing out. And when I looked back at the river, I saw the now familiar mist rolling toward me.
No one had to teach me what came next. I did it almost by animal instinct—it was the simplest of motions, a firm squeeze that I now applied to the wooden horse—and having done this I saw the new mist over the river reach out, like the white tendrils of some mythical beast, and snatch me into its maw.