The old Indian man sat there every day, outside the trading post, always in the same implacable position, usually in the way. People would move their horses around him as he sat cross-legged and silent, sometimes smoking a cigarillo but more often simply fixing everyone in his path with the same imperious stare. He might have been a Seminole, or a Cherokee, or even an Iroquois washed down from the North and deposited like sediment at the edge of the sea. It was impossible to ascertain his tribe by his manner of dress. Feathers and beads, yes, but also a white man’s shirt and boots, and wire-rimmed spectacles sticking out of his pocket. A railroad watch and a straw boater. Iris liked seeing him every day, drawing some kind of comfort in the fact no one ever bothered with him. He lingered unmolested, nowhere to go, but content for now in this temperate patch of Florida coastline where no one was in charge and no one cared and no one knew what to do. This melting pot of the listless, the undecided, the weary.
The couple kept to themselves, on the lookout for pursuers, careful not to attract any attention. Lovemaking, conversation, and silence. A tolerable amount of memory. A larger, tentative amount of hope. One man, one woman. One mattress. One lamp. They never spoke of their time on the island. It seemed now like a dream, and the dream encouraged the dissolution of other memories. Perhaps the war had been a dream, and the plantation. Perhaps every heartache was nothing but a night sweat and a vision dissolved in morning light, while every joy, every moment of bliss, was as real as a blade of grass or a bar of soap or a leaf held in the hand. And they were real as well. Two beings who sometimes felt like specters were solid with each other. They took up mass and weight. Breathed in oxygen. Ate oranges. Kissed.
By day Ambrose seemed calm. But his sleep revealed a certain vulnerability. She would wake up in the night with his arms wrapped around her, holding her tightly, murmuring things that had no context in that room. Every few days she checked the laudanum bottle, saw the level of amber liquid going down. She tried not to think of it. She was in love.
They walked to a distant meadow one afternoon, removed their clothes, and embraced in high grass, the sun straight overhead, and the sky a place where sea birds and land birds circled each other. Grasshoppers jumped on their bare legs. Iris looked straight up. A white cloud covered the sun, allowing her a painless eyeful of sky and birds as Ambrose moved against her. She ran her hands down his bare back. His muscles moved when he did. In such a short amount of time, he had grown so vital. His broken parts were filling in. His sleep quieter. His love noisier. The patient in him was sliding away and the man was reaffirming himself, right here, away from the debilitating stare of his history.
By the morning of the fourth day, Ambrose’s beard had grown rough against Iris’s skin. He bought a straight razor and a bar of shaving soap at the trading post. She sat inside the dry tub and watched him prepare himself, pouring the water, wetting the soap, swirling the brush in the lather. This was not just the act of a man grooming himself. This was the lunatic who could finally be trusted to hold a razor to his neck without cutting open his jugular vein. She was quiet. Her bare feet pressed against the cool porcelain. The razor moved down his face. The lather from the shaving soap splattered in the sink. For a moment—just for a moment, after his face was smooth and he had lifted his head up and was scraping his pale throat—she was afraid. But the blade continued to move up, not sideways, and though his hand shook slightly, finally he finished, washed the blade, and wiped it off with a towel.
He lowered himself on top of her in the tub. His cheek against hers, smooth and smelling faintly of wintergreen. The claw feet of the tub scraped against the wooden floor. The bathtub moved slightly. If it could only break free of its plumbing, they could travel that way. Making love. The bathtub inching its way back home.
One morning by the trading post, she saw a young woman holding a baby and froze. Her stare went beyond that of a woman appreciating another’s child. It went on so long that the woman herself turned away, and Ambrose put a hand on her arm and asked, “What is it?” She only shook her head, but he asked again later that night, as they were lying together in their room.
“What was the matter?” he asked. “Was something wrong with the baby?”
“No,” she said. “He reminded me of another.”
Ambrose said nothing, but she knew he was waiting. It was time to tell the baby’s story. He had been quiet all this time, in his grave in Virginia soil, some of the only rich soil left on that plantation after the tobacco crops had ruined the land. That baby she’d held in her arms, his tiny hands opening and balling into fists. Pale blue eyes, a fuzzy patch of blond hair on his bald head. White as a ghost. She had never spoken of him to the doctor or even the boy. But even if that baby could rest without his story told, she could not. Babies died in that war; they died outside it for no reason at all. The guilty would never be punished, any more than she’d already punished them. The weak revenge of a woman, drawing no blood. But what else could she have done?
She could have killed them. Shot them both in their sleep with the same pistol Nate later stole. She’d thought about it, too. But her father had preached too many sermons. Thou shalt not kill. Vengeance is the Lord’s. Shooting the men would startle the pheasants out of the soft reeds of Psalms. She’d left the pistol in the drawer. But now she held the story to the light. Ambrose lay on the bed next to her, eyes on her, listening.
From the moment her husband came home and saw her dress soaking in the porcelain tub, the water pink from the blood of the slave boy, he ceased to be her husband and slept in the guest room. She continued her duties as mistress—the overseeing of the making of the slave clothes, the maintaining of the garden, the keeping of the keys—but she was just a servant like the rest of them. They shared the same table for meals but he spoke to her rarely. Other things occupied his mind. The war was getting worse. The price of things still rising. The slaves uppity. The tobacco full of worms.
After the boy she loved had been sold, Rose, the wash girl, turned inside herself. Her silliness died and her eyes hardened. It was summer, then. Purple coneflowers blooming. The scent of bee balm strong in the meadow by the woods. The sheets Rose hung dried in no time at all. She was sixteen now, a beautiful girl whose heart was broken. The younger children splashed in the river. The older folks sat on Creole chairs at night and fanned themselves with corn husks. She was caught between, too young for most things, too old for others. A grudge born in the springtime taking root in her chest. Her hair so thick she could barely braid it. It fell down her back and was tied with a strip of leather. Too thick for a ribbon. Tawny, bare legs showed under her dress. Her breasts and lips were full. She was asking for trouble simply by existing, by growing up. No fault of her own. A strangler fig.
One afternoon, Iris looked out the window and saw Rose entering the coach house. Something was strange about her posture. A curving inward of normally straight shoulders. Iris waited for her to come out of the house but she did not. Instead, her husband, Robert, came striding up himself. He opened the door and disappeared inside. She watched that closed door. Her hands trembled on the windowpane. She leaned forward, the glass uncomfortably hot on her nose and the tip of her forehead. This could not be happening. She’d heard the tales of other plantation men, what they did with women of their choosing. But Robert was a deacon at church. The Bible was a book he quoted every day. The whisper of the New Testament, the growl of the Old. He’d even used it to justify the owning of slaves.
She could not look at him that night. She wanted to throw things at him, scream at him. But she had been silenced by then. She said nothing. She did nothing. She was afraid any trouble from her would mean Rose would be sold, just as Almon had been. She wrote her father and asked him to come and take her back to Winchester. But suddenly, all his letters back to her stopped, as well as letters from her mother. She could only conclude that Robert was keeping them from her. She stopped taking meals at the table, choosing to eat by herself on the steps. She no longer went to the other plantations, or spoke to the other wives. The parties had stopped, anyway. The war had put a layer of dust on the good china and the julep glasses.
The slaves on the plantation knew about the crime. It changed the tone of their singing, the splash of the children in the creek. Rose’s father had the look of a man perpetually holding himself back from the act of murder. And Rose’s eyes had turned blank. Iris wondered if she blamed her. She was more slave than wife now, if shame could bind a people together whose skin was different colors. And yet, she was not one of them either. She was a ghost.
Late summer arrived, then the fall. Season of apples, pumpkins, and squash. Something else was growing. Rose’s stomach began to swell. All through that fall and winter, what began as a whisper turned into a trumpet. She spent most of her time in the slave quarters. Her mother took over the laundry. She was hidden from view most of the time, but on those days when Iris glimpsed her making her way painfully across the yard, the baby in her large and heavy, she wanted to run to her. Beg her pardon. Tell her that if she could, she would take her and her family far away from here. Perhaps that was where the seed was planted.
This was survival. This was God’s plan turned to rot. This was the dead of winter. The ice crackled outside. The bedroom was always cold. Iris piled up the blankets, but her feet still felt as though they’d turned to ice. She would lie awake at night, shivering, listening to the wind move through the bare branches of the sycamores. The bromeliads in the flower garden died in the frost. And the baby grew.
One day in March, nearly a year from the day Iris stopped Almon’s whipping, she was summoned to the slave quarters by the old woman, Mattie. Rose was in labor. She’d been bucking and screaming for hours and needed a doctor. Iris saddled up the sorrel pony herself and went to find a doctor, knowing that Robert would object to the expense, but she was unwilling to let the girl suffer anymore. The doctor scolded Iris: “I have better things to do than deliver a slave baby,” he said, but came reluctantly and used the forceps to finally make the delivery. Rose had stopped screaming and was quiet when the baby came out. Her blood soaked the sheets. Her head was thrown back and her lips were pale. Only the movement of her eyes and her jagged breathing proved she still was alive.
The doctor cut the umbilical cord and tied it off with twine. The baby screamed lustily. Covered with slime and annoyed by life. The doctor’s lip curled. Iris could read his thoughts. A white baby born to a black slave. She wondered which parent he blamed. He packed his medical bag and left without a word.
Rose’s mother cleaned the baby and put it on Rose’s chest. Her father’s face was a mask of confusion. Anger and pride and wonder. The tiny boy should have been Almon’s baby, brown as cinnamon. And yet, he was still his first grandson. Rose’s eyes focused on the baby. She studied it, smiled a little. The hours spent in the coach house belonged to the master, but the baby was hers. She stroked the wet hair. Kissed the pale cheek. Mumbled something into the nape of his neck known only to mother and child. Perhaps not even a word. A feeling.
Before she left the cabin, Iris asked to hold the baby. Rose looked at her mother for permission. She nodded and Rose handed him over. Iris hadn’t held a baby in years, was surprised at his weight. He wrinkled his face as though to cry and then stopped, growing complacent as she rocked him. It had never occurred to her that the first white baby she held on this farm would not be hers. And yet, he was still so precious. The circumstances of his creation hadn’t taken the miracle away. It clung to the baby, was part of him, and you couldn’t remove it any more than you could scrape the yellow away from a fire. Rose had on a full smile now, made sleepy by the new fever the baby had brought.
“What was his name?” Ambrose now whispered as he lay in bed with her, in the darkness of the room.
She was silent a moment, let the name separate from the story that birthed it, let it gather on her tongue. It hurt her heart to say it, but it felt at home in the darkness of the room.
“Solomon.”
“Solomon,” he said, and she loved him for repeating it.
A few hours after the baby was born she heard a high-pitched scream from the direction of the slave quarters. She dropped a china plate and ran outside in her apron, following the sound of the scream to Rose’s cabin.
Rose was hysterical, her mother trying to calm her. Her father was talking about killing someone; Jackson, the blacksmith, was attempting to reason with him. They turned their heads when Iris rushed through the door.
“What’s happened?” she demanded.
Rose looked at her, eyes streaming. “They took my baby!”
Iris gasped. “Who took your baby?”
“The overseer! Mr. Sender!”
Iris ran back out the door without another word, straight to the overseer’s house. She pounded on his door but he did not answer. She screamed his name, panic rising inside her. She rushed around the plantation, asking frantic questions of the workers she saw. Clyde Sender had taken the baby and ridden away with it under his arm. That’s all anyone had seen.
When Robert came through the door later that afternoon, Iris hurled herself at him. “Where is the baby?” she screamed. “Where is the baby?”
Robert pushed her away, went to his room, and locked the door. Daylight faded and there was no word. The next morning, though, Robert and the overseer were gone again, and this time one of the young boys came to Iris’s door and led her toward the slave cabins. He walked with a purpose, his head up as though fulfilling a manly duty. She asked him questions but he wouldn’t answer her. He veered away when he approached the slave quarters and instead took a different path, one that led to the edge of the property. Up ahead, Iris saw the cemetery for pets and Negroes. A group of slaves had gathered inside the rail fence. As she approached, she saw one of the field hands digging up a new grave. Rose and her parents knelt beside it, watching. The crowd saw Iris and moved aside to let her pass.
She hovered near the grave, unable to speak, unable to move, filled with the horror of the possibility that was in the air but left unspoken. A few more shovelfuls of dirt and the shovel found the edge of a white sheet. The field hand threw the shovel aside and began digging in the dark, loose soil with his hands, pawing out the dirt, the others watching as though frozen.
He reached into the grave and pulled out a small bundle wrapped in a sheet and tied with hemp. He fumbled at the knots and then Rose’s mother reached over and undid them with sure, narrow fingers. The crowd moved inward. Iris felt a small hand on her waist, someone’s breath on her back.
The field hand unwrapped the sheet.
Rose fainted.
The boy was perfect and whole, more beautiful in morning light than in the candlelight of the cabin. His hands balled, eyes closed. Knees drawn up. Put the boy on his mother’s breast, and you’d think he’d start to suckle. So nearly alive that way.
That was the story, told for the first time. Born whole, the cord still attached. “We ran away three days later,” Iris said to Ambrose. “None of us could stand to stay there anymore.”
She did perform one final act the last night before they fled. When darkness fell, she stole out to the slave cemetery with a spade and dug that baby up. Carried him over to the beautiful family cemetery of the Dunleavys and reburied him there.
The rain began an hour after the eight of them had run away. She imagined the empty grave the next morning, there in that patch of land that held the bodies of Negroes and dogs. A hole in the earth, filled with rainwater, reeking of quicklime and reflecting the clearing sky.