BEING PAST CHILDBEARING YEARS, NAN was the only one exempt from spending a night or two with Zeke. However, she was responsible for certain hospitable tasks. It was she who showed him where to bathe, washed his clothing, and cooked his meals, serving him breakfast and lunch at the cookhouse daily.
And Nan felt bad for not realizing what he was the moment she saw him. In hindsight, she felt she should have seen it. There was a certain incoherence around the eyes she noticed that first day and, even now, was still trying to make sense of.
Some days, he ate on the cookhouse steps, and when he’d catch her watching him, he’d give her the strangest manic grin, his lower jaw twitching from side to side. The two halves of his face didn’t seem connected, deadened eyes and an animated mouth.
Ever since Patience was struck for rejecting the man, Nan had been trying to find something that would help the women’s cause. Before sunrise, she crept out into the woods, searching for roots and shrubs that might be useful. She didn’t want to kill him, just wanted to make him ill enough that he couldn’t perform.
By the time Nan reached the edge of the woods, the sun was just coming up. The dogwood trees were flowering, small red berries glistened from their branches. She could take back some berries that might cover the bitter taste of dogwood bark. Perhaps she could even make him a dessert.
In the understory, tall spindly plants with purple leaves swayed in the faint breeze. Pokeweed. It was poisonous, but the timing was all wrong. The trick with herbs was always timing. Harvesting a plant at the wrong time could be disadvantageous, even fatal. Choosing the wrong day, the wrong moon, could do a person serious harm. And she wanted to show a bit of restraint. After all, he had a family to go back to, he told her as much. Mentioned them with great care for some reason, and she thought it strange then, as she had barely exchanged more than a few words with him.
“You done?” was the only thing she could remember ever saying to him. But no matter what she said or if she said anything at all, he took her presence alone as an invitation to talk. Maybe he was lonely or just wanted this one woman to see him as whole, even if it was just the old lady cooking up vittles in a dark smoky kitchen. The impulse was a reasonable one, she supposed, but she didn’t care for it, couldn’t oblige him. She just wanted him gone, with as little harm done to the women down farm as possible.
There was some jimsonweed, a white flower surrounded by spiky leaves, but it seemed risky. It could sicken the man, she knew, but it was more likely to create an effect on his brain than his body. More likely to send him into some dreamy, hallucinogenic state where there’d be little telling what he’d actually do in that dark barn.
Some feet ahead, she spotted a chaste tree, its bright purple flowers just beginning to open. She wandered over to it, sensing some vibration calling to her. An unbelievable phenomenon she realized whenever she tried to describe it, but she had known it all her life—this ability to hear plants and trees whispering to her, offering her help. Young women came to her all the time, trying to develop remedies for one ailment or another, as if healing was just a matter of putting together the right recipe. They didn’t understand the most important part of her job was listening. That most plants have dueling abilities, easily able to heal or kill you. And their effect on a body could change based on the makeup of that body. It wasn’t like baking a pie, she warned whoever would listen to her.
She had learned this the hard way, after years of trying to ignore what her grandmother had taught her when she first began apprenticing. “The gift ain’t just here,” the old woman used to tell Nan, placing a palm over her eye. “It’s here, too,” her grandmother had said, motioning toward Nan’s ears and heart. “Plants able to do most anything, if you listen to ’em.”
Take the chaste tree for instance. In women, the seeds were thought to aid one’s fertility, but in men, the seeds acted as a sedative for their lower parts.
She reached past the bright flowers, the fan of green leaves spread out, the thin reeds bearing clusters of black seeds. She took two seeds, crushed them with the edge of her mattock, and inhaled their sweet scent. Yep, these will do nicely. She carefully removed a few clusters of seeds and dropped them in her lap bag.
The sun rose higher, and she rushed back the way she came. She paused for a long second, in front of that dogwood tree she saw earlier, as it was still whispering to her. She put her hand over it and thanked the trunk in advance for its assistance, before peeling off a few pieces of its smooth gray bark. It was another sedative but, in the right amount, could cause nausea and painful stomachaches.
Then, she hurried back to the farm, a remedy already forming in her mind. She’d boil the dogwood bark for a few hours and use the liquid to make Zeke a soup. Then she’d crush the seeds and sprinkle them on top. She’d set it all with a nice piece of corn bread, just ripe for dipping.
Back at the cookhouse, she got the corn bread on the flames and the dogwood tea boiling. And when she saw the women coming in for their midmorning meal some hours later, she left them their coffee and bread without saying much. She didn’t want to offer them false hope. The remedy would likely work, but it just as well might not. Bodies and medicines could be unpredictable.
* * *
WHEN LULU’S TURN CAME, she sat down opposite Zeke and emptied her pockets. On the dirt floor, she had laid out an assortment of valuables, one by one. Two silver shillings, a handful of seashells, a small mirror the size of a fist, a speckled barrette, one gold button, and a set of rosary beads.
“And I got a hog, too. I ain’t seen him in some time, but can find him, if you want him.”
Zeke looked at her puzzled. “All this for me?”
“One hand washes the other, right? They pay for a thing. I pay for the contrary,” she said. “Understand?”
His jaw hardened. “I understand you best get those trinkets out my sight.”
“I ain’t mean you no offense.” She held up an iridescent cone-shaped shell. “You ever seen the creatures that live in these? If I had a place this pretty, I’d never leave it.” She was rambling now, her words running together as she picked up each object and explained its origin story. “This mirror belonged to my sister. She gave it to me when we parted. And this barrette, too. It’s broken now, but I still keep it. Oh, and these beads . . .” She picked up Patience’s rosary beads and rolled them in her palms. “These belonged to my mother. My inheritance. I’d hate to part with them, but . . .”
The man’s hard jaw softened and his eyes wandered, as boredom overtook his face.
He let her talk awhile longer, before removing the rope from his trousers and lowering his pants.
She talked the entire time. Now contradicting everything she said before. New linkages arising. The shillings handed down from her father when he died. The beads from an uncle, a cousin. The mirror from an old mistress who had taught Lulu her figures. The barrette a gift from her oldest brother.
She had offered Zeke her entire life savings. A treasury of things lifted from all the different places and farms she had been. None of the stories were true, all the people she linked to the objects imaginary. When she first stole them, she had only intended to borrow them, but people noticed them gone before she could return them, and it became much too hard to give them back. The fact that folks missed them, wondered after them, only confirmed what she had gained by taking the items. The closeness born of the object. The gift with all that warm feeling attached. A lineage of kin, blood or otherwise, connected to it. That was the thing she wanted. That was the thing she took for herself.
She wasn’t willy-nilly about it. She wouldn’t pocket any old thing, and to her credit, she tried to do it less and less. But there were particular times when she couldn’t help it. Whenever the world felt particularly dark or more lonesome than usual, the treasure of objects made her feel better. It couldn’t be helped that an object’s warmth soon wore off and she’d have to obtain something new to keep the good feeling going.
And so it was with Patience’s rosary. The wooden beads connected by a frayed piece of twine radiated something unfamiliar to her. The kind of connection an orphan like her had never really known. On her last farm, folks called people like her lost, a no-name—a person sold away from her family so young they were doomed to remain forever unmoored. She had been sold four times and she wasn’t an old woman yet. In truth, though, she didn’t know how old she was—older than Serah for sure, but younger than Junie and Patience, and likely closest in age to Alice, who believed herself to be twenty-four or so.
To the whole of the group, she lied all the time about the friends and family she’d left behind. Aunt Carrie, who was the funniest, cousin Brendy, who could dance better than any of the neighboring folks. A trail of names from an assortment of farms, names and faces she mixed up now and then, fading as the years passed. Because no one else need know she was a no-name. If they couldn’t recognize it, she wouldn’t bother telling them. People sensed it, though, even if they didn’t know what it was they were sensing. The sliver of desperation was familiar as the smell of rain coming.
She hunted for the telltale signs of it on her and had only recently accepted that there was little to be done about it. She was the kind of woman people disliked immediately, without the need for evidence. An instinct of some kind that remained no matter how much wooing she did. The cache of objects, though, never refused her. They remained perfect and arrested emblems of affection and warmth. What did it matter if that affection and warmth was originally for someone else?
And so, when the man set about his work, she cast him in the same light. She placed his hands where she wanted them. She imagined them a lover’s hands. She told him how she much she’d missed him, reminded him how long it had been since they had last seen each other.
“Don’t you remember that peach tree?” she whispered in the man’s ear, now no longer Zeke but a man she had known two farms ago, or a woman at an outpost near Houston.
“Mmhmm,” he answered.
The willful collapsing of memory never adhered to the moment perfectly. The grafting was always lopsided and ill-fitting, but if she squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated, the phantasm held up just long enough.
* * *
JUNIE HAD ALREADY BEEN working her own plan. She hadn’t washed herself or changed her clothes in days. And after many hours chopping cotton under the July sun, the rank smell emitted from her intensified with every passing day. And to make matters worse, she started wearing an asafetida bag around her neck, to ward off a summer flu, she said. The smelly herb mixed with body odor was enough to give anyone a headache. The smell was so strong we slept with the window covering pulled back, the front door cracked, and the fire still going in the hearth, even though it was still unearthly warm at night. Usually, we kept the window covered and the door shut, with a chair in front of it, for fear of lobos or bears or men. But this time, we wrapped our weekly food rations tightly in a quilt and hid them underneath the floorboards. We used up half of that week’s salt drawing protective lines along the window’s edge and in front of the door.
Whenever we grumbled about the smell, she paid us no attention, just hitched up her trousers and retightened the rope she used as a belt, her way of letting us know she didn’t care nothing about our grumbling, and it wouldn’t change her mind. She was stubborn that way.
The night Junie was sent up to the barn, she picked up the tray from the cookhouse and spit in it. She had to remove her cob pipe to do so, and a tiny bit of ash fell into the soup. Ah well. More flavor.
With one hand, she held the tray and with the other, a pine knot torch. It was a moonless night and the humid darkness felt syrupy and thick. She raised her torch high as she stepped into the barn, spotting Zeke sitting in the corner. He waved her over.
He appeared smaller than she remembered, a bit paler, too, his forehead damp with sweat. She put the tray down near him and sat out of arm’s length, but close enough for her smell to overtake him.
“Ain’t feeling too good,” he said.
She continued to smoke her pipe, eyeing him closely, stifling a laugh when his eyes filled with water, and he coughed, the smell finally reaching the back of his nostrils, the rise of his throat. He coughed again, and she cackled.
“Say, gal, whose britches you got on?” he asked after a while, peering at her trousers with hazy, bleary eyes.
“They mine. You like them?”
“No,” he said, making a puzzled face.
She laughed, his confusion coupled with sickness making her feel more at ease.
“They were a gift,” she said. In truth, they started out as a punishment. All the women wore long skirts and dresses, no matter the season, no matter the task. In muddy weather, the hems grew black and soiled. When washing clothing at the creek, the skirts were cinched high around the thighs, but still got soaked by rising water. And Junie was no different until she and Lizzie got in one of their rows.
Out in the reaches of Texas country, Lizzie was horribly lonely, and she liked to summon Junie up to the house to lallygag with her about times back home, as if they were old friends having tea. Junie hated these sessions, but she put up with them, in hopes of securing a bit of news about her children back in Georgia. Whatever affection the woman claimed to have for her, she knew she should treat it like glass, a fragile endangered thing. But sometimes, she failed miserably.
The last time she did, she was too exhausted to hold her tongue and criticized Lizzie’s jagged cutting of the cloth set aside for the women’s winter garments. The cutting was a task Lizzie always insisted on doing herself, but since she didn’t have to sew what she cut, she didn’t realize how much extra work she created. Junie listened to the woman chatter on, while slyly trying to steer the scissors straight, but all she could think about was how exasperating it was going to be later trying to make the seams lie flat and the edges not fray. Finally, she interrupted Lizzie midstream and demanded the woman hand the scissors over. “A blind mule could do better,” Junie muttered.
After that incident Lizzie took her clothing and left her only Harlow’s old trousers and shirt to wear. Most women wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of britches for fear of being seen as mannish or ugly, fears some of them already had by nature of the labor they did. After all, when was the last time anyone had seen a white lady make a road or fell a tree? “Ladies” wore hoopskirts and bonnets. They sat in parlors away from the oppressive glare of the sun, where they sewed or spun. And maybe some of the poorer ones went out and fed the chickens or milked the cows or even churned the butter themselves, but there were certain things they would not do. And because Junie and the others washed the linens of said ladies, they knew that while their clothes and sheets may smell of flesh or musk or urine, they were hardly ever crusted with soil, mud, and the carcasses of dead bugs—all things she and the other women beat from their own clothing and linen regularly.
She didn’t take back what she said to Lizzie, initially out of spite, and as time went on, she grew to like the trousers and wanted to keep them. She couldn’t ignore how nicely they kept her thighs from chafing in the heat or kept the insects from attacking her ankles in the high grass. The skirt was a tent for things, what got trapped underneath often sank its teeth and claws into her flesh. But no more.
The women ribbed her about wearing the white man’s pants. A talisman of his power, his evil. What could it do so close to the skin? It was likely to cause her flesh to rot, they teased.
Zeke moved toward his tin cup of water and drained what was left, putting it down with a loud clatter. His chin wobbled on his neck before pointing in her direction. “Did you bring me a drink?”
“No.”
“Fetch me some water? Please.”
“No.” She returned his puzzled gaze, but her humor was lost on him.
He jolted up out of the barn and vomited, his body heaving and seizing, until finally he set down right there in the entryway, his head leaning against the doorpost, his mouth sucking air in greedily.
Junie stood up and slipped past him, so relieved she could cry. By the time she reached the cabin, she was whistling.
She pushed open the door and grinned. “He down like a rabbit in a trap.”
Serah and Alice looked at her, puzzled.
“What you mean?” said Alice.
“He sick.”
“How sick?” asked Serah.
Junie shrugged and stretched out on her pallet.
“But won’t Lucy think you did something to him?”
“Doubt it, but if he do, maybe it’ll put something on his mind. Make him realize this ain’t the way.”
“He think you did something, ain’t he likely to kill you?” asked Patience, without raising her head.
“He can’t get the harvest out of the ground without me. He know it and I know it,” said Junie, pulling off her trousers. “Besides, that traveling nigger ain’t dead. I know dead when I see it, and he not it.”
* * *
IT WASN’T THE FIRST time Zeke had been poisoned. Since being sent out on this “traveling business” nearly five years ago, he’d been stabbed, burned, blinded, hexed, peed on, and called every name but a son of a God. Husbands, boyfriends, and fathers waited for him in the dead of night, and he didn’t like fighting them, but when they came, he was ready. Not because he wanted to hurt them, not any more than he wanted to have sex with their women, but where else was he to put all these things thrashing about inside him?
When they swung at him, he swung back harder, cracked ribs, kicked out teeth, not because he was in the right. He knew if he was in their place, if any man touched his wife or his daughter, he’d do worse. But he had a job to do and the quicker he did it, the quicker he could get home to his own family.
He accepted that it was only a matter of time before someone killed him, before he was castrated or infected, made so sick he withered and died, and every day of every trip he went out on, he woke up wondering if that day had finally come to pass, unable to barely breathe until he returned home and hugged his wife.
That wasn’t always so. When he was young and foolish and unmarried, it didn’t seem such a bad job then. At least in theory. He was more social then, loved going to frolics and always had a few sweethearts on neighboring farms. And like most young men, he had a ferocious appetite for lying down with them. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to him, not unlike eating or sleeping. But that changed when he was sent into one smelly back room or another and told to copulate with a crying, fearful woman as if he were no more than a bull or a horse.
And late nights, when he gathered with the men on his home farm to drink rotgut and gamble a bit, they’d press him for lurid details about the women he met, lust gleaming in their eyes. Just once, he wanted to tell them how he hated it, how all the looks of disgust and fear began piling up inside him, how they burrowed under his flesh like a nasty parasite. How he used to love the smell of women, but the musky scent of these scared angry strangers clung to him for days, made him sick. But he knew what the men wanted to hear from him, so he gave it to them. He boasted about all the women he bedded, how sweet the loving was, and the scores of children he gave them. He never told them how he begged his owner to stop sending him out, how he just wanted to be home with his wife, and how Master Simmons just laughed and shook his head. “Knew I should have never let you marry in the first place,” the old man said. “You know, Jensen was just by here and he’s taking quite a liking to your little boy. Now, I told him he wasn’t for sale, but . . .”
This was the cost of keeping his family intact, having his wife and children all under the same roof. And if he only had to “travel” a few times a year, maybe that was worth it.
His face burned with fever, his clothes were drenched in sweat, his stomach roiled like a stormy sea. Someone had finally done it, he thought. And now he could put to rest the idea of stopping it himself. He had seen desperate men take to themselves with an ax, chopping off a finger or a foot to avoid being sent into the jaws of cane country. It never worked. Lying never worked either. It only ratcheted up the evil. He had tried it a few times when he first started out, when the woman was so upset, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and when the door was unbarred, he lied and said they had. He quickly learned it only made things worse, only created maniacal audiences—viewing parties of white men who sat alongside, tittering and ogling, clamoring and shouting like they were at a boxing match.
But maybe that was all over now. He flopped over, a cloud of dust rose up, filling his nose and mouth. He coughed and lay back, opening himself to the full weight of the fever. And when the old cook came in with vittles and medicinal teas, he waved her away. Harlow then dosed him with ipecac and castor oil, which made Zeke’s retching worse for a spell before the fever finally broke. Once it subsided and he was finally able to stand again, he had to admit the feeling that washed over him wasn’t relief.
* * *
SOMETIME LATER, MR. LUCY told Junie to take Zeke his dinner and look after him. It became clear to everyone then that they hadn’t succeeded in ridding themselves of the man or his task. Serah took to hiding out after that, disappearing into the woods for hours, sometimes a whole day, hoping she might be skipped in the process. She’d come back, hungry and wan and peppered with purple inflamed pest bites. Nan would feed her and grease the wounds, but at the first opportunity, she’d disappear again. So it wasn’t surprising when they put the harness on her, a strange contraption with two irons bars across, one encircling the shoulders, the other, the torso. The two crossbars were connected by a vertical iron spine that towered up over the wearer’s head, where a small bell was fixed.
The bell rang all day, and most of the night. Every time she moved and even when she didn’t. She slathered wet mud inside it to make it stop, and that would help once the mud dried, but it didn’t take long for the mud to dry further and flake off in large chunks, raining bits of dirt into her hair or down her dress.
She wore it nearly a week before they removed it, the sudden absence of the weight making her light-headed and nauseated. And even with it gone, she still heard the ceaseless ringing inside her, between her ears, bouncing around her chest.
One night, Mr. Lucy dispensed with the dinner ritual altogether and walked her to the barn himself. He closed both barn doors and locked her inside with Zeke, the darkening sky still visible through the slats. She banged on the door until she was tired while Zeke whittled on a bench. She slid down to the ground, her back against the door.
“Water?” he said, cocking his head in the direction of a pitcher on the floor.
Her throat was dry, but she couldn’t bring herself to say yes to the water. It seemed like saying yes to the whole thing.
He stood up and filled the cup and set it down a few feet from her. His long shadow spread toward her, and she pulled her knees up to her chest to keep the shadow from reaching her feet.
He returned to his bench and continued his woodwork. “I know you hates me and I don’t mind it. I don’t. But whether you hate me or not, it all comes out in the wash just the same. I can get it over with and you never have to see my ugly mug again.”
She heard the wind outside knocking against the cabin walls. An inevitability of a rising storm headed toward her. Neither Patience nor Junie nor Lulu had escaped it. And they were smarter than her, wilier than her. How did she think she could sidestep this thing when they hadn’t?
She remembered when she and her brother Jonas were little. They were twins, her being the oldest by a few minutes. Often enough, they took up trouble together, but when their misdeeds were found out and the time came to pay for their sins, oh, how different they were. Jonas would walk right up to their father and take his beating, by sticking his hand out or turning his backside to the waiting hand or tree switch. Jonas would cry when struck, but not long afterward he’d be off, on his next bout of mischief, as if the earlier event had never happened, whereas she prolonged the spanking for as long as possible. She hid out for hours, sometimes a whole night, her father finding her in her favorite hiding spot. He’d pick her up and put her to bed next to her brother, but the next day, the whipping still awaited her. She’d be dragged back to the site of the alleged crime and whipped. And even though her father never hit her as hard or as many times as he hit Jonas, she cried twice as much. Was twice as angry and got spanked for still sulking about it days later.
She missed her brother, but it was hard to remember him without his teasing admonishments. He’d say whatever happened was all her fault, because she made what should have lasted a few minutes go on for days. She heard Jonas in her ear now, below the faint ringing.
And so, she didn’t stop the man when he finally pushed her down into the hay. She closed her eyes tight and thought of Jonas on the other side of a whipping, gleefully throwing sticks in the air and watching them fall.
* * *
WHEN ALICE’S TURN CAME, she had already decided. She’d go into the barn one Alice and come out a different one. She had long harbored an obsession with molting animals—snakes, grasshoppers, and frogs that shed skin, leaving their old selves behind. Whatever happened in that dark room need not touch any other parts of her life. She could find whatever was to be found in the barn and leave it there when she left it.
She picked up Zeke’s dinner and took it into the barn. She sat down, and when Zeke waved the tray away, she ate his until she’d had her fill. She was always hungry, and it was the first time in months she was able to eat as much as she needed, as much as she wanted. When she was done, she pulled out a small bottle of liquor she had swiped from the Lucys’ storehouse. She hadn’t shared it with any of the women and she didn’t offer Zeke any either. She drank until she had enough, until the dark barn grew darker still.
That was the last thing she remembered. Every blurry thing after became part of this flaky, outer layer of skin she felt molting off her body. Every place he touched. Every patch of skin that met his.
It all would go, sloughing and molting away. Some of it went willingly, but some she had to help later with her fingernails or the sharp point of a twig, or even the dull edge of a whittling knife.
* * *
AFTERWARD, WE ALL FELT at sea. Like Zeke was some strange illness we all caught and couldn’t rid ourselves of. Some felt it in the body—congested lungs, rheumy eyes, and stomach pains; while others felt it in the mind—a thick brain fog or the opposite, a compulsive agitated spinning.
Being so close to one another only made it worse, only made the grime inside pulse and spin and pitch. Whereas by one’s lonesome, the muck would settle and harden, without another person kicking it up all the time.
“Stop all that jawing.”
We found ourselves splintered then, unable to unstick ourselves nor pull anyone else from the rising, tightening mire. We were incapable of that for a while. All of us except Nan. But we hated her for being spared, then hated each other for not having been.
“Pass me by with all that.”
That’s how we spoke to each other then, in an exhausting state of seething. Made only worse by the fact that we were stuck together, like appendages of the same hand.