Kind One

6.





WHEN LUCIOUS WILSON’S WOMAN had me out of the cold frame behind the outhouse and into the light, she did not lift the heavy stick she had taken up at me and she did not ask me any question about how I had come to be there. She was an old woman and had an eye to see through things, and she saw through my skin where it had healed or it hadn’t to the wounds I had lately had, and through those to the wounds I had offered unto others, and through those to that four-square kingdom in Kentucky and the woods that surrounded it and the thundering tunnel of my days that led up to my father’s house in Indiana where I had started out from. She looked at me and she blinked her crop-colored eyes and dropped her heavy stick and told me wherever I’d been, I couldn’t live in Lucious Wilson’s cold frame and I’d better come on.

Lucious Wilson didn’t have that old woman’s eye, but he had that old woman, and after she had nodded, he told me there was a place for me in his employ if I knew how to work and wanted it, and I told him I did. He did not ask me where I had come from. I expect that after she had gotten me bathed and settled the old woman had told him. Whether or not her seeing extended to the naming part of things, she told me that first night they would need to know what to call me. I thought of my old teacher and told her that my name was Sue.

“Well, Sue, you aren’t sleeping in a cold frame tonight or any night after if that’s the way you want it,” she said.

“That’s the way I want it,” I said.

The next weekend they had me over to a revival outside of town where there was a line-up for dunking, and that old woman had me take my place. The minister spoke and dunked and spoke again. It was a pretty place, and they had set up garlands on the bushes. The spot they were in was next to a short bridge and the little ones had their legs dangling off it. Lucious Wilson went in the front of us. He had on a fine suit and waded right out into the water and let the minister speak his words and dunk him down. There were some of his other folk in the line, men and women, then there was me. I had on some Sunday clothes they’d given me. There were good folks on the banks, all dripping and weeping and wiping at the air above their faces with their hands.

“Go on now, Sue,” the old woman said.

I went. I stepped into the water and the water, which the minister had been telling could be robe and belt both to any who wanted it, walked away to either side of me. I stepped on the bottom and as I stepped, the water walked even away out of the mud and my borrowed shoes kept dry. The minister spoke his words about salvation and the blood of the good lamb and leaned me back and pushed me down, but the water had walked away, and when I came up I was dry. I know the minister knew this because when he spoke his words again about the robe and the belt, he whispered them up against my ear and never when he was finished with his whispering said amen, and I know the old woman knew because when I got back out onto the bank, she said the best thing to do about it would be to sit on the grass by the garlanded bushes with the others and, dry or wet, commend myself to Him who was lurking everywhere. To Him who sat in the shadows and the dark parts with us. To Him who would in the end harrow every evil and offer even those of us the water didn’t want, and whom the water wasn’t helping, a jewel from his glittering crown.





That’s not what Alcofibras came back to tell me. All those weeks after Linus Lancaster had been pushed down onto the table, Alcofibras didn’t walk through the wall of my enshackled night to sit cross-legged and ringed by rats before me and commune about robes and jewels and crowns. After he had sat, shrunk and whip-broken, lit by the glow of his own burning eyes, wrapped in a red shawl, he hadn’t stood himself up to speak about the coming of the Lord. I know that, even though all he said to me by way of greeting in that bowl of blackness was, “Evenin’, Miss Ginny.” No one, not even me with one of my eyes shut to bruising, would have mistaken what followed for anything to do with the lamb.

Alcofibras flung back that shawl and showed out his whip-cut shoulders and lifted up his gangle legs and twisted his arms, and the light from his eyes lit up every bit of him. His knees went up either side higher than his head, and the pink soles of his feet slapped back down on the ground. There wasn’t any music to it beside those pink soles slapping the cold ground. Presently his hands commenced to hit together. When they had come back away from each other, he would hold them out at me like he was saying Stop. Then he bowed and showed his back and shoulders then threw up his eyes at me. Then he bowed again and pulled his shawl over his head and shuffled around until his naked back was before me, then he raised up and leaned this way around, and as I looked an eye the size of a saucer opened up in the middle of his shoulders then closed, and he turned and pulled his shawl back down and smiled at me and recommenced lifting his legs and slapping his soles and hitting his hands and holding them out like he was saying Stop.

Then he stood still and looked at me, and looked at me and looked at me, and mouths grew up over his arms and legs and each one of them opened and all of them wailed at once, then went closed and quiet. Alcofibras then came up closer to me, his knees climbing to either side of him and his hands hitting together, and he leaned in close and when he did, ears came out of his forehead and his cheeks and his neck and his chest, until they were on every part of him and even the ears had grown ears and the ears were shaking, and I found myself sobbing because all they had to listen to was my poor breath and my poor heart, and all his mouth had had to wail to and all that eye had had to look upon was my poor self, shackled in the dark, a sorry thing of the earth, when outside there was so much, when out beyond my four-square kingdom, out along the midnight flanks of the republic, out atop the great wide oceans there was so much, and I called out to Alcofibras, who after a hundred, a thousand years was sitting quiet again with the shawl wrapped around his shoulders and his own dead eyes and ears and mouth, “What have you shown me?”

“What I showed to your father when we stood out there in the woods that day you come up on us and hid behind a tree.”

“And what was that?”

“The way of the World, Mother. The way of the World, Miss Ginny,” he said.





I did not breakfast with my husband the following morning. Nor did I break my bread with him the morning after that nor any over the week to come. I sat or lay in that shed, and they did not come to get me to dig holes and fill holes or hug at the oak tree. They kept the door open during the long day, and when I was able, I leaned against the boards at the back of the shed and looked out at the well and the woods beyond. Now and again a pig would wander past. One rainy afternoon a sow came in out of the wet and curled up in the corner, and I passed some hours in contemplating the mud on her fat flank and the lift and fall of her midsection and the kick she would give when she hit some rough pasture in her dream. When she woke she walked over to me and gave me a sniff.

“Yes, I would like to kill you and grind you and eat you,” I said.

“Go on and try,” she said.

“I would get a big skillet and set the whole of you in it,” I said.

“Only I would get a big skillet and set the whole of you in it first, and then I would call in my youngins and let them set their sloppy mouths to you first,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

Then she flicked her tail and walked off.

Once or twice over that week I woke on my dirt to find a bowl of water and some dry cornbread next to me, but I never saw my benefactors. They had turned themselves into voices, and those voices would come and sit on the other side of the boards behind me and speak or sing. On the fourth day I lost track of what it was they would sing or say. On the fifth day I spoke and sang back, but each time I did the voices went away to the land where voices live in columns of wind and light. On the following day, they did not. They remained there on the other side of the boards. So I sang them “Glory, Hallelujah” and “The Old Wooden Cross.” I sang them “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a yuletime song I didn’t know the name of. There wasn’t much lung to my voice, but it came out.

When I didn’t have any song to sing I talked. I told them I’d seen Alcofibras dancing, and that he might be back to dance some more just any one of the nights to come. I told them that after he had come to dance for me he had come into one of my dreams and torn pieces of himself off to eat until all that was left was his mouth. I told them otherwise I’d been thinking about the stars in the sky and the cold proposition they presented, for I had. I told them I’d been thinking about the wind in the big trees and the animals clinging to their branches, for I had. I told them I’d scraped myself out a long, low pit to sleep my nights in and that I was grateful for the blanket they had given me and for the slops and the water, for I was. I told them I had been thinking about old Pharaoh and the Egyptians and the jasmine and brook flowers and amethysts he had worn against his breast, and how when I was a child I had often wished to lay my eyes on all the glories of Earth’s kingdom as well as heaven’s, for this was true.

I told them that when Linus Lancaster had come up to Indiana in the long ago, he had not come with it in his mind to fetch me, that he had come with another in mind. He had come up to fetch his second cousin, my mother. He had got word that my father had lost life along with limb in his battle and was in the hereafter with all the dearly departeds of the earth, and he came knowing that his second cousin, my mother, had always favored him. I told them I knew this because I had heard my father and my mother yelling over it. My father was for putting Linus Lancaster out into the yard on his ignorant ear. There were ways to confirm whether someone was deceased or just crippled before you came calling after what had or hadn’t been left behind.

I told my benefactors beyond the wall that after I had heard this fight and understood Linus Lancaster’s errand, I had twirled myself up in front of him, thinking in my foolishness that I wanted to be quit of my father’s house and my father’s cane, and had sat down on Linus Lancaster’s broad lap under an apple tree and made him look my way, and that I had said soft things about his dearly departed and had blown heat into his heart even though I knew nothing about heat nor about heart. That I had bought up in advance every crumb of the loaf that had been baked for me and now was eating it. For I had and I was.

I told them all of this and sat up against the board and shivered and wiped sweat from my brow and looked out the open door to the well and all the holes I had dug and filled to the big woods beyond, where what was left of Alcofibras lay buried under rocks in his bloody shawl.

“I’d like to come out now and walk to the woods,” I told them.

“Aren’t you out here with us already?” said one of the voices.

“Aren’t you out here with us right now?” said the other.

Yes, I thought. I am.

For I was.

I went floating past them where they sat on their bench. I floated across the yard and into the barn and out through one of its windows. I passed the sow I had previously parlayed with. I skittered along the surface of the creek. There were fish in its soft currents. I floated and floated. Then a wind came up and took me at my throat and flung me back into my dark.