Conyers, Georgia, 1847
IF IT WERE up to Cynthia, I’d have been gone three months ago when Albert told her I was here, and pregnant was my excuse. “So long as I don’t have to see her wretched ass nowhere on this property,” was Cynthia’s compromise after she finished with her hell no’s and that bitch this ’n’ thats.
So most days I stay out back in the garden behind Albert’s workshop. I can stretch my legs back there and run in place to keep myself well. It’s what Cynthia prescribed. Not to me. But I heard her tell it to her hand, Sarah, before Cynthia sent her off: “I don’t care what that doctor say. You gon’ regret the two days of labor if you don’t get strong now.”
I walk far.
Four and five miles each way, zigzagging across Cynthia’s backfields and back roads like a mule plowing, getting stronger by the day, my belly bigger. I stopped trying to suck it in after Albert caught me standing sideways in the glass looking at myself and taking in deep breaths to make sure it weren’t just gas.
It weren’t.
ALBERT’S BEEN HEATING his black metal rods to an orange glow so he can reshape ’em into something new. Beautiful things. His hammers have tapered his metal into delicate flowers and leafs and scalloped coat hooks, turned skinny metal pieces into the thick feet of end tables, and spread fat pieces into thin fishtails and scoops of spoons. He’s twisted metal staffs into the braided hair of banisters, and punched holes to join two pieces together . . . and split ’em apart. His anvil is the iron table where he bangs out the story of life—that with vision and fire, we can all be something different. And this is what he gives to Cynthia to sell so we can keep our place here. I sew and hem dresses. Men’s trousers and shirts. It ain’t much but it’s something.
Negroes on horseback pass through here a few times a month to water their steeds so Albert built a metal trough for ’em. It’s prettier and more watertight than the one Cynthia got but she don’t want to pay him for a new one.
Summer’s been a bouquet of green fields and cherry blossoms. The last buds of the season showered me in pink. The scent of Jeremy was in ’em. It reminded me of long days along the stream and our secret nights of quiet hallelujahs.
I imagine him coming home to me. That he’d pick me up and without a word, kiss me—long and open-mouthed. That when he saw our baby boy looking just like us, he’d love us both.
But it’s no time for remembering.
Not now.
Now, I got to keep Albert alive.
THERE WAS SCREAMING when it happened.
So much screaming.
I took off running in the direction of Albert’s scream. He flew out his shop door with his hands on his head, his hair on fire, and his shirt and neck was smoking. He threw hisself in the trough and flailed in the water like it was deep and he couldn’t swim.
He lifted out the water, took deep breaths, dunked back in again. I scooped water on the parts of him that he was trying to drown.
“I cain’t see!” he screamed, throwing his hands at me.
“You got to calm down!” I said. “I cain’t help you like this.”
He hummed and jumped up and down, dumped his head in the trough again and again. I got next to him, scooped more water over him, saw the edges of his shirt burned down his back, his neck. A burning ember must have got him, a flash of fire. The new lotion he was gifted, a trigger. The top of his head and face was bleeding, his skin was peeling away in gray sheets.
I ripped my dress to try to put it on his burns but he grabbed my hand before I could touch him. With his voice quivering, he said, “You touch me with that cloth and it’ll melt in my skin.”
I backed away from him. Didn’t know what to do but give him room.
He bent over the trough clinching his jaws together while the smoke piped off of him smelling of burnt meat. I reached into the trough and got a hand scoop of water, threw it on him, but by the time the cooling wet reached him, it was only sprinkles.
“Just let it be!” he hollered, desperate. Dunked his head completely, baptized.
I can only sit with him now ’cause water don’t heal.
It only stops the worsening and gives us time to think about what went wrong.
For the last three hours since he ran out on fire, I haven’t done nothin. I guided him back into this shop and went and got Cynthia. Thank God she was home and would come tend to him. But ain’t much she can do but wait with me ’cause right now he’s like lava, she said. His skin is red underneath with blackened skin on top. He’s cracking and recracking, shivering on his bench slouched over. Blood and sweat drips from his face, skipping like a picnic fly from his chin to his shoulders. He squeezes the neck of the whiskey bottle in his hand.
Blisters on his face and neck are swollen, red, and weepy, and little white bumps have broke out on his nose and under his swollen shut eyes. Patches have spread on the sides of his face where his brown skin was and is gone now. Cream-colored splotches have risen there, too.
“Albert?” Cynthia whispers. “Let me see you.” She barely touches him and he grunts.
His eyebrows are gone. A slimy film has smeared in their place. The ridge of his top lip is rippled black and dry. Cynthia say, “I think you look better like this,” but Albert don’t laugh. Neither do I.
“I brought you something,” she say but he grunts, no. “I know you don’t like my medicine but it’s the best thing for you right now. One time won’t get you hooked.”
He grunts louder, shakes his head, bringing hisself terrible pain.
“Have it your way,” she say.
She raises white sheets around him like a tent and tells him, “It’ll keep the soot in the air from blowing in your wounds.”
She wrenches the bottle of whiskey from his hand, turns her back to him and pours something else in it—a syrup—and shakes it up. “Drink some whiskey,” she say and tilts the bottle to his lips while keeping the flow of it away from his burnt top lip. The double heavy syrup is already separating from the liquor and it snakes though the neck of the bottle and into his mouth.
After a few minutes, he stops shivering.
We wait for him to sleep before she asks me to help wash him. Real gentle. Tapping him with warm water. Took us both a hour to do everything. But she the only one who could help us now.
“Don’t burst the blisters,” Cynthia say, getting up to leave. “Don’t use healing oils. And don’t move him ’til tomorrow. But tomorrow he’s gon’ need to walk. Just back and forth to the end of the shop. Outside, if he can stand the light. You’ll have to hold him up by his unburnt parts—his forearm . . .” I start crying when I look at him again. He’s hurting and I cain’t do this. I cain’t take care of nobody.
Cynthia looks at me softly and waits for my tears to finish and when they don’t she say, “The stuff I gave him is gon’ make him wrong in the head so when he wake up, he might want to fight you. You need to protect yourself and the baby, so give him more of that drink the second you hear him waking.”
I wipe my tears, nod.
“And it’s fine to double the amount of syrup if you need to. It’ll keep his face numb, stop him from cracking the blisters and skin. He don’t need an infection.”
She gives me the vial of her syrup and stops at the door before she go. That soft look again but she say, “This don’t make us friends.”