Night Wherever We Go, page 18
“We should go toward town,” one woman said. “One of the missions will feed us.”
“No, we should rest, set new traps. Wait ’til nightfall and then pass on by,” Aaron said.
They didn’t lie about the missions. There were several in old Goliad. Ghostly white buildings ruined by the war between Texas and Mexico. But they looked unchurched to me, so I didn’t trust them. I hung back while the others knocked on the door. A white priest welcomed them inside. I stayed out there in the lane for a while, just watching, thinking maybe I was wrong. That I had cheated myself out of a warm drink and some hearty vittles. And just when my stomach got the best of me and I approached the door, a young Mexican shooed me away from it. He shook his head. “Mentirosa . . . malvado . . . a cheat . . .”
I was still unsure what he meant, but I followed the man down the street, where he led me to a small house, where he and his sister fed me and let me trade them a piece of silver for a Mackinaw blanket.
I was still eating at their table, when I heard a commotion outside. They told me not to go out and I watched through the bottom portion of their covered window as Aaron and the rest got hauled away. I could hear the white men doing the hauling arguing about what to do with them.
“The bastard shot a priest. Who’s going to buy him when the devil’s got a hold on him so?”
N.
10
BIRD,
Just wanted to let you know I reached brush country. New terrain. Mesquite, shrubs, prickly pear. But it rains a lot. I make a tent by hanging the blanket between a few shrubs until it passes. When darkness falls and the wind howls, specters loosen from their hiding places and roam free. It’s best not to look at them directly. They dance, they sing, they loom large like cornstalks. I don’t protest, though they scare me.
When the rain stops, they follow me. More haints come out, some with monstrous blue heads, some with wings and scaly backs. A grand parade following me all the way to the Rio Grande.
N.
11
Oh, what joy to reach the river, but what a surprise it was. It was shallow with white rocks all around it and a few pecan trees along the banks. I walk upstream and barely find enough to cover my knees. I step in anyway, wash myself in the clear blue water, and am thankful to find my net, still tucked away, deep in my sack. I catch as many fish as I can, though I got my tinder wet and had no way to start a fire.
I leave there, thankful and relieved, with a full net of small redfish and bass, convinced the hardest part of my journey is over.
Some hours later, I follow a drift of smoke to a small campsite of vaqueros. One says he’d let me fry up my fish, if I was willing to share. We cook it up and eat well.
And I’m lying there in the dirt, too full to move, when the vaquero breaks the horrible news to me. “Oh, mi amigo, that wasn’t the Rio Grande. That little gulp of water was the Nueces. You’ve still got miles and miles to go.”
For the second time in days, I could’ve cried.
N.
12
The strip of land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande is a hellish one. The men at the campsite told me so. They were heading north, outrunning something else—debt higher than the Sierra Madre.
“Keep every eye open,” they warned me. As the strip was full of desperate men—grifters, deserters, and bounty hunters. I did as they said and still, a white man caught me foraging for food and roped me with barely two words between us. “Oh, lucky day. You gone be my ticket, boy.” I told him I wasn’t running, that I was allowed to hire myself out when I could, but he didn’t believe me. Instead, he wrapped himself up in my blanket and dragged me to a blacksmith, where he tried to bargain for a set of irons.
While there, he goaded two or three white men sitting around, each waiting for their turn. “Oh, I’m going to get top dollar for this fugitive. They’ll give me at least two hundred. Maybe three!” He directed his comments to a scruffy man swinging a pair of horseshoes. “Barnes, you should come in on this. Let me use your horse and I’ll give you a percentage.”
Barnes snorted and spat on the ground. “I wouldn’t give you a tin of my piss.”
The blacksmith refused to front the man a set of leg irons and we had barely gotten more than a few paces away, when Barnes appeared, trying to rob the man of his hot ticket. The two quarreled. Each firing upon the other. I took off, not waiting to see who won. I saw a horse tied to a post and ran toward it. I yanked the tie loose and hopped on. I took off, dipping around the blacksmith’s yard and out past the edge of town, going as far as I could.
N.
13
When I reach the Rio Grande, I can see why it’s called a great river. It’s so beautiful I wish I could gather it up and bring it to you. A mighty winding, careless thing, it is, in the way water can be.
Aaron warned me it’s not easy to cross. It’s deceiving that way. The current is stronger than it looks. It makes one think he can just walk or swim across it, but the bottom is unsure and the banks aren’t safe. Soldiers and Texas Rangers roam up and down the perimeter seeking runaways.
But never mind those no-account bastards, the river says, for it is the true divider of persons. If you manage to look on the surface and baptize yourself in its waters, it likely means a gauntlet lay at your back. Miles of thirst and hunger, wolves and soul dealers of all stripes are somewhere behind you. And now, just one lowly unassuming river.
Like all devils, it seduces. It shimmers in the sunlight and it feels like all I need to do is hoist myself upon it, paddle lightly, and soon I’ll reach the opposite side. When it takes me under, I’m surprised for only a moment, but one moment is all it needs.
N.
14
BIRD,
Remember the traveling preacher’s talk about heaven. Pearly gates, tables full of food, grinning faces of kith and kin. I still don’t believe him. But the Negro colony down here is probably the closest I’ll see in this life. I nearly drowned, but the Mexicans who fished me out of the river knew exactly where I was going. And I arrived in Nacimiento de los Negros half-dead on the back of a dray, but I made it all the same.
The town is small and growing every day. Some folks have been down here a full generation or more. But most are like us, running from Texas or Louisiana, or Oklahoma. A few Seminoles from Florida are thrown in, but I suspect they were exiled from the Seminoles’ town not too far away.
The folks here got small farms, work their crops, and sell them at the market. It’s not perfect. Capture is a steady threat, with the Rangers and other soul dealers charging across the border to kidnap folks, but we’re far enough south that it happens less now, or so they tell me.
I wish you could see it because I can’t describe it proper. The land is rocky so the crops don’t yield much. Most men do some cattle work also, and the songs they sing are both familiar and new, now full of Spanish words.
Listen, this might be my last letter for a while but don’t be cross with me. Let me get well. Get a plot of my own to farm and some chickens, too. Let me build you a small clapboard house with a real floor and a real bed.
N.
Chapter Twenty-Three
BY THE TIME OF THE first frost of the season, Serah had already begun to suspect what she was feeling in her body was something more than a flu. Her stomach was jumpy, always upset, always threatening to empty itself. It was tiring, made her sore, in throat and abdomen. Made others upset at her for wasting food. Got so others reclaimed her breakfast, her lunch. And she was too weak from vomiting to fight anyone to keep it.
Every winter, Nan complained about the drop in temperature, however mild. How cold could settle under her joints and in her fingers. Serah thought maybe that was happening to her, too. Winter had finally come for her body but instead of her joints, it attacked the flesh. Made her back ache, her breasts tender, her stomach a queasy, roiling sea.
She went to Nan, to ask if she had something that might help with the nausea or the soreness. Maybe she could diagnose this particular strain of winter illness.
“You ain’t catch cold, you caught,” Nan said flatly.
“What you mean?”
It was hog-killing time and Nan’s hands were lodged deep in the guts of a pig, the shiny loose liver, the translucent slick spleen. The sight usually didn’t bother Serah. But this time, the bloody gore of it, the foul smell of it—both sent her reeling. She backed into the wall, clamping a hand over her mouth.
“I mean caught. With child. Now, get out of here before you mess all over my floor,” Nan told her.
Serah stumbled outside to retch in the yard. Her head hurt; her stomach ached.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT FEW days, Serah spun between two distant poles, wanting it and not wanting it. She spent days thinking of nothing but trying to kill it. She’d chewed cotton root for hours, until her teeth were yellow and chalky, and her jaw tired. And she cursed herself for how sporadic she had been before, only chewing it when she felt like it and stopping anytime she grew tired or bored or hungry.
She had taken to speaking to the spirit directly, willing it to loosen itself from her. She asked her saints to help it along, send it back to the otherworld so it could choose again. Often, she thought of what Junie said that day the cotton roots were found. If she had one, it’d be the stockman all over again, with Monroe put to them all, one after the other, and back again. She had already betrayed the women once. They’d never forgive her this.
But there were days when she couldn’t help imagining a family in a white clapboard house, just like Mariah’s. Noah would be sitting on its porch, a sweet brown babe asleep in his lap. He’d look up and grin at her, easy as the breeze. And it was then, she got to thinking about generations and lineages, and what if they did kill him, he was gone from this earth as if he was never here. This soul lodged inside her may be the only thing of him that remained. And on those days, she did nothing at all—no cotton root, no camphor, no rue. She followed the women to the fields and back, spun yarn until her sight blurred, and then took her hunger and nausea to bed, as the sun had long set, and nothing but cold dark was to be had anyway.
She was capricious that season. Avoiding the women and then wanting nothing more than the sound of them, the joy of their raucous laughter, the sharpness of their wit. She hated the cold that flooded her body but wanted the feeling of frozenness, of long-standing numbness.
Sharp cold beget a howling colder wind, heavy nausea followed by a black fatigue. There was little she could manage after a day of breaking up the ground or spinning thread all day.
And that didn’t change until Harlow showed up one evening and walked her over to Monroe’s cabin. Monroe hadn’t been back long from his last job, barely a week had gone by. And in that time, the two hadn’t said much to each other.
Monroe was sitting by the hearth, warming himself, when Harlow appeared in the doorway.
“Since you’re here, thought it was time you got your gal back,” Harlow said, pushing Serah inside the room.
Monroe stifled a groan. “Thank you, sir.”
“Did you not want her back? You want another?” Harlow asked him.
Serah watched as Monroe’s face grew puzzled. Monroe looked at her. Was that all it would have taken for them to be separated? Or was it a trick?
Harlow hadn’t closed the door and she looked outside at the blackening sky. She inched toward the door. Maybe she could hide out in the woods a few days, but she’d be on her own. None of the women would bring her any food. They might even blame her for whoever Monroe chose next, if he dared ask.
“Don’t know, sir,” Monroe began, trying to suss out the temperature in the white man’s face. His eyes stopped at the man’s waist, where a shiny new revolver sat on his hip. Serah followed Monroe’s gaze and saw it, too.
“You can speak freely.”
“Well, we alright, but a better match might be made with one of the others,” Monroe said carefully.
“How come?”
Both were quiet for a long moment, unsure of how to answer, or what was being asked.
“What a disappointment,” Harlow said, sniffing the air. “It’s been over a year since I threw y’all that fancy wedding affair and you both promised me portly children.” He narrowed his gaze at Monroe. “What good would it be matching you with another, if you can’t make butter with the one I give you? You make good on your promise and maybe we can talk about another match.”
Harlow turned toward Serah. “Go on, now. Get in.” He shoved her toward the bed.
She sat down on it, next to Monroe.
“For God’s sake, act like you’re husband and wife. Do I have to get in there with you?”
She got underneath the blanket and Monroe did the same.
Harlow moved toward the door. “This time, I’ll give you some privacy, but if I come back tomorrow, and y’all still acting like clergy folk, I won’t be so kind.”
* * *
WHAT EMERGED THE NEXT few days between Serah and Monroe was a steely tension. The two sizing each other up, waiting for the first blow. They were both extra cautious about where they sat, where they stood, what they drank, what they ate. They wouldn’t share water or food, each preparing their own meals, each securing their own water from the well, and keeping it covered and in sight at all times. They each donned their own protective work, in front of the other. Part ritual, part performance. Serah could tell he was still angry at her for making him sick the way she did that summer, and in truth, he had grown sicker than she expected. And she couldn’t say for sure if it was because of the work she had done on him or something else. They all fell prey at one time or another to the mysterious ailments of this country—fevers of all kinds, boils, influenza, dropsy, pneumonia, pleurisy, malaria. Though she knew many who didn’t believe in that possibility. If anything befell them, it was because of the malicious root work of their enemies.
His belief that it was her doing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she figured. It made him cautious, tentative. Made him less of a bully, lording over her with his size and strength. And so, she didn’t say much more to dissuade him of the notion. Instead, she narrowed her eyes at him and drew shapes in the air and on the ground. She put down salt around herself, prayed to her saints, whispering loudly enough for him to hear. Neither slept well the next few nights, dozing off and jolting awake, intermittently throughout the night.
One evening, during their nightly chores, she figured she’d at least try broaching the subject of a truce with him. She was sitting at the table, sewing, while he was trying to repair the chinking in one of the cabin’s walls. She watched as he pulled moss and rags from the crevices and replaced them with mud.
“You think that’ll hold?”
He shrugged. “We’ll see.”
When he was done, she handed him a cloth so he could wipe his hands.
“How ’bout we call it even?”
He gave her a funny look. “It ain’t even. Won’t ever be.”
“A truce, then. At least until it’s warm out. And if you still mad then, we can—”
“Don’t care about then, I care about now.”
“Fine. What then? You want to poison me. Maybe you already did. You see I can’t keep my dinner down half the time. Ain’t that enough?”
“Nope,” he said firmly.
“When we even then? When I’m dead?”
“Sounds good to me,” he said, grinning at her.
* * *
THE UNSEASONABLY COLD WINTER turned the cabin into a burial pit. A heavy snow collected on the roof one night, and hearing the wood creak under the weight signaled to Serah they were being buried alive together. The temperature inside the cabin grew so cold it became hard to continue the way they had been, seething and wary all the time. They worked together to finish sealing the cabin walls and fortified the blankets with more moss and hay. She knitted woolen socks for them both, while he helped card sheared wool so she could make more things with it.
And while her belly had grown a bit rounder and more taut, it wasn’t much more than the usual bit of monthly bloat, which was easy to hide. Besides, she wore most of her clothes all the time now, two dresses layered on top of each other, a slip and a pair of woolen stockings underneath, and a woolen jacket. The hours of daylight were so short, she washed and dressed in the dark each morning and did the same at night.
They made up new rules. Attacks during sleep were off-limits, as was food, because there was so little of it, once Harlow had cut their rations. Whereas formerly they were each allotted one peck of corn per person weekly, now they were given one peck to share, along with the smallest sliver of bacon. More would be given, they were told, once they delivered portly children.
Soon, the performances stopped altogether. They saved the salt for other things. Whatever Monroe hunted from then on, he brought into the house—rabbit, squirrel, quail. From her garden plot, she added turnips, radishes, and onions. They managed a decent meal between the two of them, but she let him attribute her constant chewing of cotton root day and night to pica, a fruitless attempt to assuage her hunger.
The effort of getting sufficient food to eat was enough to make them almost friendly sometimes. But if any chummy feelings managed to develop, the Lucys quickly dashed them.
Harlow’s nightly rounds were one thing. These had always happened intermittently, but these days, they were constant. At some point, nearly every evening, he made his way over to the quarters and pushed inside every house, making sure every person was present and there weren’t any neighboring folks among them. In Junie and Lulu’s cabin, he was usually only there a few minutes, but now, with the couples he lingered. With Monroe and Serah. With Patience and Isaac. He’d pose dirty questions, wanting updates on procreation.
