There so long that he, whose name was not remembered, was of the land. Saw everything. Quiet as moon’s shadow cast through a shroud of cloud was present with no presence, but with predetermined purpose, always there, always there, seeing but seldom seen.
Said nothing but made himself known to those had the need to know.
Her wagon had clopped and rattled past, with her looking, as many of them did, more a widow than a wife, her face dry as husk, the reins in her lye-wrinkled fingers held as tight as her jaw was clenched. Of course she had not even seen him on the road shoulder. Why would she? Her twin gals, though, each the dead spit of the other, had, or thought they saw their own version of him without knowing what they were seeing, but hadn’t acknowledged it to him, or to the other, from whom they kept no secrets, but still their hands held the other’s hand, tight.
The wagon is out of sight when he leaves the road and cuts, without the crunch of footsteps, off across the parched hill bottom acreage of nettles and brambles, of what, in their time, had been the wooded approach to the hilltop main house of the Kimbrough Plantation. The land is now on the books somewhere as Kimbrough Properties, a subsidiary of Kimbrough Company Works. On it, an acre or so away, is the cabin the Wilcox woman left from a short while before. It, once looked down on from the house now char, is typical of its breed. It had been the overseer’s place six or seven decades of seasons ago, and it is from which the overseer left one rainy night with the young girl beside him in the buggy seat. It has been rebuilt over time from the original one room to now house the Wilcox’s, a family of four.
He stops short and leans on his skint maple branch walking stick. A colored boy he cannot identify by name but knows is a recent release from what whites call the convict lease camp is, his attention on the Wilcox cabin, alert as a bird dog in a bog, and doing a pretty fair job of moving and not being seen through the overgrowth of black bent grass and bottlebrush buckeye wide and high as the wall of a one-story building, going golden now as it does this time of year.
It is certain this is not his first visit around here under cover of the foliage, and it is certain also that neither is he here for chicken stealing or other some minor mischief. No. No, look at him yonder, he has other business on his mind as he, low-crouched, moves to squat out of sight within sight of the outhouse. Surveying it like a spider eyeing the weaving of its glowing silver and gold web. This young negro, still getting reused to walking without the leg irons, is here for business of a cold and keen-edged kind. Reckoning or redemption is his aim.
But by nightfall the boy who will soon leave without seeing if his prey has been entangled in the strands of his plot, will sit, resting, his back against the scaly gray trunk of a water hickory, halfway through the swamp, his wits about him, reading the assurance of the stars before dreaming a dream-filled sleep.
The boy could have set the shack and the sorry excuse of a useless barn afire; he could have snuck up to wait by the door and with a baseball-sized rock brained Blue Britches when he exited and tipped him down over into the well, but that would have been too much like a baptism, and therefore contrary to his intention; could have waited behind the outhouse and stepped around with the same rock and watched him, in his surprise, step back the way negroes had to do when a white passed, then hit him and watched with satisfaction as he dropped to his knees, face forward in the dirt—all of these, contemplated during the long hot days and short hot nights, the boy had harbored for all his time under the guard’s dominion, but the boy’s knowledge of what would have followed: the commencement of bedlam of a white man murdered and a negro, out of shackles, running, so that the remaining negroes would not, on his account, have to hunker down as the crackers rose up like devil dogs with bloodshot eyes and slobbering mouths, their tails ablaze, so no, the boy did none of these; instead, carrying a small sackcloth bundle, he leaves his hiding place, heading off back through the brush toward the river, and trots upstream.
So, the negroes at worship or on their porches or still in bed or cooking or just dragging in could continue without new threats to their oppressed existence on his account.
With his stick across his knees, he sat on a stump. He was like a shadow of the Groundsel bush at his side. He had a bemused expression as he waited with the patience of his age and nature. He listened and saw and felt the flurry of every living thing brought out and breeding abundantly in the business of the morning: the music of tweets, twitters, chirps, warbles of the titmouse’s, chickadees, and blue jays that perched year-around; and the transient grosbeaks, bobolinks, thrushes, and towhees that soon after this coming Tuesday’s rain, full of seeds, grains, beetles, wasps, and caterpillars, would, like the colored boy, leave there.
Directly Wilcox, dour, shirtless, exits his cabin, yawning and scratching, and carrying the overnight slops can, walking barefoot from his porch across his yard down the slight slope to the privy to open the off-kilter door and move inside.
He whose name was no longer remembered heard the sound and curses from inside the outhouse. He smiled and hummed a tuneless air like a warbler’s trill. He moved off, purposeful as a bee, to pollinate through mind to ear to mouth to ear to mouth to ear, so by Monday, end of dinnertime, all coloreds in Mardalwil County, Alabama and further would know, beyond whites’ authorization to stop it, detail by detail of the occurrence at the old overseer’s place that yester-Sunday morning; so that, from that time forward, Mister Cotton Wilcox, Cotty to his woman, would go from being that rusty-toothed, blue britches-wearing, peckerwood camp guard who rode shotgun over the Kimbrough Works convicts on a company horse; daddy of them scrawny, devilish, coot-crazy twin gals with the angelic voices, and gaunt wife who thought her husband was the very picture of the hardest working, most family-dedicated man she knew; the one who had called that colored boy Mule nigger to his face for the last time, and who wasn’t as smart as either one of them took him to be, or he wouldn’t have squatted to take his Sunday morning dump on the one-holed plank of knotted pine that the colored boy, who had by this time crossed the river at the place described and recommended by one of the older men who had walked the woods and fished the river through there for years before being swept up by the authorities in a local raid and sentenced to a planting season of work on a squad with the constantly grinning boy called Mule, who that morning, had nigger-rigged the outhouse seat, cleverly enough so it didn’t look meddled with, so Mister Wilcox sat and tumbled ass-first in full body flop down into the depth of his convict labor-dug privy.