A WEEK LATER, AT THE mouth of the creek, under the moon’s half-closed eye, we threw in everything but our bodies. We had requests and we had offerings. We had leaves, fronds, and husks marked with sharp rocks and yellow clay and we had stolen apples, wild purple flowers, and fragrant buds of honeysuckle.
We waited for the water to take what we gave it, counted on its ebb and flow to absolve us, to wash our sins and carry them away, toward another town or dam, to be eaten or shredded by beavers or waterfowls, but minutes after throwing everything in, we could see our requests just lying there, floating, a thin soup over a shallow rocky bed.
No matter how many sticks we used to push it down below, a mirror of the muck inside us remained on the surface of the water. We could only watch for so long before clouds of mosquitoes drove us away.
From the creek, we went to The Tree to pray, but couldn’t shake the muck of the river. It felt personal, the muck solidifying. It seemed as if it was determined to hang around. Praying felt like a last resort. Some say, it should’ve been the first. And sure, some of us had been up to it all the while separately, but when gathered together, the power of the thing was supposed to be magnified. But the more desperate we felt, the more impossible it seemed.
And whereas usually it was just Serah who felt outside of it, unable to follow the thread deep down into its center, where all the joy and light was supposed to be, this night, it was true of nearly all of us. First, Junie wouldn’t sing the song and Nan had forgotten the oil, and Patience led the prayer at whisper level, her voice getting lower and lower as she went on. No one wanted to hold hands or lock arms or get trapped inside the closed circle. No one wanted to close their eyes, even.
The night sky felt full of beings—water spirits and untethered dead, gulls and dragonflies and murky stars—but it also felt empty, like the land was seeping and stretching out beyond its initial borders. The desert to the west, the swamp and gulf to the south. To the east, more dead trees and cleared land, and farms like this one aiming for Eden. And north, miles and miles of what? We couldn’t fathom where the end of it might be and where we were in the midst of it all.
No one felt like praying. We wanted to be inside the prayer and song, the deep vibration and sweaty fist of it, but couldn’t muster any of the necessary stuff to get up inside it. Some of us understood that these were relationships one remade over and over again. All the time, one was seeking alignment with God, with her Dead, with the trees and animals alike. All these relationships required sun and tending to, but the youngest among us didn’t understand the back-and-forth. What did it mean to be saved or spared or favored if only to be thrown out again later? It seemed hard not to be undone by such thirst, how often the spirits needed to be fed, praised, or worshipped. And how at times like these, all that effort felt fruitless.
* * *
“DON’T LOOK LIKE Y’ALL much for doing this,” Patience said, shifting her knees up under her. We were all sitting by then, tired of trying but unwilling to give up just yet.
No one said anything.
“Alright then, I’m going to bed,” Patience said, pushing herself up off the ground.
“Wait,” said Nan. She poured out the contents of her sack in front of us. A pile of roots, clippings from the cotton plant. “Here. Divvy this up among y’all.”
“What we supposed to do with it?” Serah said. We all knew the plant well, the knobby thinness of its stalks.
“If you don’t want a baby from that breeding man, take it, chew it but don’t swallow it. You’ll need to do it for as much as you can, long as you can . . .”
Quiet fell over the group. Serah reached over and started separating the knobby roots into small piles of equal size, one for each woman.
“Don’t include me. I don’t want them,” said Patience.
“How come?”
“’Cause I don’t to want to lay eyes on that nigger ever again.”
Serah stopped arranging and sat back on her heels. “You think Lucy will bring him back?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Lucy too cheap to bring him around again,” Junie said. “All week they’ve been fighting about money. Miss Lizzie didn’t even want Zeke here.”
Patience made a sucking sound. “I hate it when y’all act simple.”
“Watch your mouth,” said Junie.
“You ever seen them put a bull to a heifer? They put them together over and over again,” said Patience. “And if they don’t get a calf, they try a new bull. They don’t just stop . . .”
No one moved or spoke. The humid air settling thicker now, as if her words had sucked up all the good breathing air. It was hard to swallow, to think, to hear anything over the blood inside us now rushing up to punctuate her speech.
“The only way to make it stop,” Patience went on, “is to let a babe come.”
The words felt like a kick in the stomach. Something about the thought laid bare felt not just appalling but dangerous. It didn’t feel like a careless thought or even just a likely possibility, it felt like a prophecy. And from the one woman who swore she didn’t believe in them, didn’t believe any who said they were born under the caul and had the ability to see what others couldn’t. And maybe that’s why it felt more solid, more akin to fact than fraught speculation.
Junie reached toward the pile of roots and pulled them toward her. “I won’t have another . . .”
“Even if?” Patience asked, staring at Junie now, the question hanging in the air.
“Even if. Zeke’s lucky he still catching breath. May not hold true next time.”
Serah turned her face away. She didn’t know who or what to listen to. Everything they said made sense and no sense at all and both possible futures were terrifying. She pressed her fingers into the dirt, the soil underneath cool and moist on her fingertips. She hoped her dead would rise up and speak to her through the soil. She figured all she could do was hold off the horror that seemed the closest. Zeke might come back, but he might not. A child born of him, though, would be here longer. Serah reached over and pulled a pile of roots toward her.
Patience shook her head. “Simple as can be, I declare.”
Alice nodded in agreement with Patience.
Nan, who had been quiet this whole time, leaned forward and spoke. “Make up your own mind, but I think y’all have a better chance of the man not returning if y’all all go the same way.”
“How you figure?” asked Patience.
“If you grow big and the others don’t,” Nan began, “then Lucy think something probably wrong with them. Maybe they can’t have any more children or caught some women’s disease. But if none of y’all bear fruit, then he think maybe something wrong with Zeke.”
“But he’s had to give women plenty of children before, or else he wouldn’t be the traveling nigger.”
“Yeah, but maybe he all used up now. He had so many he spent up.”
“Maybe.” Patience was thinking now, we could tell. Serah slipped one of the roots in her mouth and began chewing. She offered one to Patience, but Patience just stared at her hand for a long while until, finally, she took it and put it in her mouth. And once Patience was in, Alice, Junie, and Lulu followed suit.
* * *
WE CHEWED THE ACIDIC roots for days and days. We kept them around, soggy ground masses tucked in the pockets of our cheeks. The constant chewing made our faces tired, our breath sour, our teeth yellow, but they dulled hunger, dulled the mind just enough to lower the worrying pitch. This we did, until the supply of Nan’s clippings dwindled, and by the time the frenzy of harvest was upon us, we had already become so adept at removing one plant or another, in different parts of the row, across the entire stretch of it, that we built up an abundant store of the root, which we buried in the ground underneath the cabin floor.
And when Lucy hired on some workers to help with the picking, the pitch of our worry increased, as we worried the three men might be brought on for some alternative purpose. But we rarely saw them, we worked together in one group, and they another. And we held on to the fact that they were never introduced to us as one thing or another, that we were never even told their names or what farms they came from, as proof that they were just passing through and we should regard them as no more than a cloud drifting over. The men must have found us rude, for the few times they tried to engage, greeting us with smiles or clowning around for our pleasure, we turned away from them. Only Nan showed the smallest sliver of teeth when she fed them a hot meal, but the rest of us remained as still and indifferent as the trees.