Deuteronomy

Samuel was second to wake, his face orange from the glow of a sun slow to rise. The rooster was making its noise, but Samuel had heard it often enough that it faded into the background as though it were silence. Isaiah was up already. Samuel had told Isaiah earlier in the morning to let himself lie, let himself rest, remember the moments. It would be considered theft here, he knew, but to him, it was impossible to steal what was already yours—or should have been.

He lay there, as tranquil as the morning that had dyed his body with the coming light, adamant on not budging until he absolutely had to. He didn’t see Isaiah, but he could hear him just outside the opened barn doors, heading toward the henhouse. Samuel sat up. He looked around the barn, observed the scattered hay from the night before, noticed how the dark hid those things and the day left behind trails that weren’t exactly clear. One wouldn’t necessarily assume that the cause of the mess came from pleasure. More likely, they would think it the result of carelessness, and therefore worthy of punishment. He exhaled and stood up. He walked over to the barn wall where the tools hung in rows. He went to the nearest corner and retrieved the broom. Reluctantly, he swept the evidence of their bliss back into a neat pile, nearer to where their misery was already neatly stacked. All of it to be sustenance for beasts anyway.

Isaiah came back into the barn holding two pails.

“Morning,” he said with a smile.

Samuel looked at him with a half grin but didn’t return the greeting. “You up too early.”

“One of us gotta be.”

Samuel shook his head and Isaiah smiled at that too. Isaiah put down his pails, walked over, and touched Samuel’s arm. He slid his hand down until their hands were joined. Isaiah squeezed, and eventually Samuel squeezed back. Isaiah watched as Samuel’s untrusting eyes fully embraced him. He saw himself there, in the gaze of the deepest shade of brown he had seen outside of dreams, warm and enjoyed. He opened his own eyes a bit more, inviting Samuel in so that he could know that warmth was waiting for him, too.

Samuel let go. “Well, since we up, we might as well . . .” He gestured at the plantation broadly. Isaiah took Samuel’s hand again and kissed it.

“Not in the light,” Samuel said with a frown.

Isaiah shook his head. “There’s no bottom below bottom.”

Samuel sighed, handed Isaiah the broom, and walked outside into the morning onto which a humid sky was descending.

“Don’t feel like doing this.”

“What?” Isaiah asked, following behind him.

“This.” Samuel pointed outward at everything around them.

“We gotta do it,” Isaiah replied.

Samuel shook his head. “We ain’t gotta do shit.”

“So you risk whupping, then?”

“You forget? We ain’t even gotta do this much to risk whupping.”

Isaiah folded in on himself at that. “Can’t stand to see you hurt.”

“Maybe you can’t stand to see me free neither?”

“Sam!” Isaiah shook his head and began to walk toward the chicken coop.

“Sorry,” Samuel whispered.

Isaiah didn’t hear him and Samuel was glad. Samuel walked over toward the hogs. He grabbed a pail and then, still watching Isaiah, it crept up behind him. Recollections often came back in pieces like this.

That day—it was night, really, the black sky all but stardust—they were still too young to understand their conditions. They looked up into that sky, through the knothole in the roof wood. A blink was all it was. And exhaustion held them down on a pallet of hay. Dizzy from work that their bodies could barely manage. Earlier, their hands brushed at the river and lingered longer than Samuel expected. A confused look, but then Isaiah smiled and Samuel’s heart didn’t know whether to beat or not, so he got up and started walking back to the barn. Isaiah followed him.

They were in the barn and it was dark. Neither felt like lighting a torch or a lamp so they just pushed out some hay and covered it with the piece-cloth blanket Be Auntie had made them, and then they both lay down on their backs. Samuel exhaled and Isaiah broke the quiet with “Yessuh.” And that hit Samuel’s ear differently then. Not a caress exactly, but still gentle. His creases were moist and he tried to hide them even from himself. It was a reflex. Meanwhile, Isaiah turned on his side to face Samuel and all his soft parts were open and free, tingling without shame. They looked at each other and then they were each other, there, both of them, in the dark.

All it took was a moment, so both of them understood how precious time was. Imagine having as much of it as you wanted. To sing songs. Or to wash in a glittering river beneath a lucid sun, arms open to hold your one, whose breath was now your breath, inhale, exhale, same rhythm, same smile returned. Samuel didn’t know he had the heat until he felt Isaiah’s.

Yes, recollections came in pieces. Depending on what was trying to be recalled, they could come in shambles. Samuel had started slopping the hogs when the pin that had been stabbing at his chest all morning had finally broken through. It had only a little blood on its tip, but the blood was there all the same. Who knew blood could talk? He had heard others speak of blood memory, but that was just images, wasn’t it? Nobody ever said anything about voices. But last night, Isaiah had brought so many of them with them into the barn on the end of his question, a question that had smashed all of their established rules, the ones that they had come up with between them, the ones that so many of their people understood.

Samuel tossed the hogs more food. He ignored the pin sticking out from his chest and the whispering blood, which was now coming forth as a droplet, not unlike rain, carrying within it its own multitude, its own reflections, a world—a whole world!—inside.

He began to feel hot and itchy inside.

You ever wonder where your mam?

Before then he was able to avoid the pinch of such inquiries, lose them in the abundant sorrow that permeated the landscape. No one asked each other about the scars, missing limbs, tremors, or night terrors, and so they could, therefore, be stashed in corners behind sacks, cast in waters, buried underground. But there was Isaiah digging around for shit he had no business digging around for, talking about he “ain’t mean.” Then why did he say? Samuel thought they had a deal: leave the bodies where they fucking lay.

They were in the dark last night, so Isaiah couldn’t see, thankfully, that Samuel shifted on the ground, almost stood up, and announced that he was heading to the river, where he would submerge himself and never resurface. Instead, he sat there, muscles flexing under the strain of grasping for something not there. He blinked and blinked, but it didn’t stop his eyes from burning. What kind of question was this?

He had let out a breath in a huff. Even in the dark, he could feel Isaiah’s calm anticipation, its steady, relentless tugging, coaxing him to open himself up yet again. But had he not opened himself up wide enough? No one else had known what it was like—what it looked like, felt like, tasted like—deep inside of him but Isaiah. What more could he give that wasn’t everything already? He wanted to hit something. Grab an ax and hack at a tree. Or maybe wring a chicken’s neck.

The quiet between them was stinging. Samuel took a deep breath as the shadow of a woman rose in the dark just at his feet. Darker than the dark, she stood naked: breasts hanging, hips wide. She had a face that was somehow familiar, though he had never seen it before. Further, a shadow in the dark made no sense. They were daytime denizens. And yet, there she was: a black that made night jealous with eyes that were, themselves, questions. Could this be his mother, stirred up by Isaiah’s broken pact? Did that mean he was a shadow, too? Suddenly, she pointed at him. Startled, he spoke suddenly.

Maybe. No way to ever know.

Maybe she made Isaiah speak, too?

As the hogs ate, Samuel tried to wipe the blood from the pin and remove it from his chest. He stopped when he heard a noise in the distance. He wasn’t sure if it was the rustling of weeds or a yell. He looked toward the trees and he saw something. It looked like the shadow. It had come back in the morning light as a reminder. Conjured up by an inquiry, it would now roam everywhere he roamed because that is what he had heard mothers were supposed to do: watch every move their child made until such time that the child was no longer a child and it was then the former child’s duty to create life and watch it bloom or watch it wither.

“’Zay! Come on over here and see this.” Samuel pointed out toward the woods.

Isaiah ran up beside Samuel. “Ain’t you gon’ apologize for what you said to me?”

“I did that. You just ain’t hear me. But look. There. That there. Moving.”

“The trees?” Isaiah was quick with those words, distracted, wanting to discuss the other thing.

“No, no. That thing there. Don’t know what . . . a shadow?”

Isaiah squinted and he saw a flutter.

“I don’t . . .”

“You saw it?”

“Yeah. Don’t know what it is.”

“Let’s go see.”

“And get whupped for being near the edge?”

“Bah,” Samuel said, but he also didn’t budge.

As they both peered into the edge, what had at first been black became white as James the overseer emerged from the army of trees. He was followed by three of the toubab in his charge.

“You think they found somebody?” Samuel said, oddly relieved that it was James and not the shadow.

“They say you can tell by they ears,” Isaiah replied, looking at James and his men. “By how the bottom part hang. But I can’t see from here.”

“Maybe they just patrolling. Ain’t it time for the call to the field?”

“Uh huh.”

Neither of them moved as they watched the men work their way across bush and weed, still walking along the perimeter toward the cotton field, which stretched to the horizon and sometimes looked as though its clouds touched the ones in the sky.

Empty began to show signs of life as other people emerged from their shacks to look the light in the face. Samuel and Isaiah waited to see who, if anyone, would acknowledge them. These days, only Maggie and a few others had kept them in their graces, for some reason.

The sound of the horn startled Isaiah. “I ain’t never gon’ get used to that,” he said.

Samuel turned to him. “If you right-minded, you don’t have to.”

Isaiah sucked his teeth.

“Oh, you happy here, ’Zay?”

“Sometimes,” Isaiah said, looking into Samuel’s eyes. “Remember the water?”

Samuel found himself smiling even though he didn’t want to.

“And one gotta think and not just do to be happy,” Isaiah said, returning to the question Samuel asked.

“I reckon we should get to thinking, then.”

The horn sounded again. Samuel looked toward the sound, over by the field. His eyes narrowed. Then he felt Isaiah’s hand on his back. Isaiah held it there, calm and steady, the heat from it not making things worse. A moment, which would pass too quickly and yet couldn’t pass quickly enough. It was almost as if Isaiah were holding him up, pushing him forward, giving him something to lean on when the legs got a little weary.

Still, Samuel said, “Not in the light.”

Still, Isaiah kept his hand there for a moment more. He then started to hum. He would do that sometimes while stroking Samuel’s hair as they lay together in the dead of night and that would make Samuel’s sleep a bit easier.

Samuel wore an expression that said, Enough now! But in his head, etched across his mind, in bright shining voice, was:

Isaiah soothing. He always a soothing thing.