Kind One

8.





IT WAS LUCIOUS WILSON thought I might be quick with a piece of chalk and one day asked me was I interested in tending the school he had it in mind to set up. He had people in his employ, and those people had children and he had his own, and the only school nearby was farther away than he liked to send them. He had seen me gobbling at the books on his shelves and had watched me help his children make their numbers and letters and had a feeling it would work out right. He had hired a teacher from Marion to come out by autumntime and had a shed at the edge of one of the fields that would make a fine school by then, but if I was willing to work in rough conditions I could get it going now. He would see to the slates and primers and make sure I had what I needed.

He put this to me while I was scraping spilled oatmeal off the wall in his front hall. He had his hands kind of slipped into the pockets of his purple vest as he spoke. This was still in my early days in his employ. They hadn’t started in to call me Scary. He had seen the fresh blood on my ankle but hadn’t blinked. I was still what you could call young then and had been some time away by then from Charlotte County, and some of the freshness of strong young arms and strong young legs had likely bubbled up into my head and made me think some of the furniture had floated back into its right place, and I set down my scraper and looked up at Lucious Wilson and told him, yes.

“Good,” he said and went away with a whistle, and I picked my scraper back up and went to work on the oatmeal, but a week later I found myself wearing a snug black dress and neat black shoes and standing at the front of the room. There were six or eight of them, depending on the day and the farming weather, that Lucious Wilson had directed into my charge. They sat on benches with a slate each in their laps, and I had a chair in the corner I could move to if I needed it and there were windows to look out of and fine black fields all around. I had asked Lucious Wilson for a map of the country and some paper to draw big letters and numbers on and with them had decorated my abode. The pride of the whole thing was the chalkboard. It had been brought up by wagon from Indianapolis. Lucious Wilson said the shed might still be rough, but it would have a chalkboard. I wrote my name on that board the first day. I wrote, “Miss Sue.”

She’s dreaming, you will have said to yourself by now. She’s old and life-kicked and set to dreaming about things that never happened. Ginny Lancaster of Charlotte County, Kentucky, or Scary Sue the oatmeal scrubber, a schoolteacher. And yet there I stood those mornings in my black dress. There I was.

There wasn’t much to the first day or two. I had Lucious Wilson’s little ones and another little one and then a fistful that were all but grown. Not a body in the room knew its letters to speak of, so we started there. My trick about it was to pretend I was in that old schoolroom of mine, that room where I had written my story and been called to the front of the class. I could even bring up the pine smell of that place, and it wasn’t a thing to imagine that my old teacher was standing just behind me with a little smile, whispering at me about what to say. We did letters and took a peek at numbers and sang songs, and another few of those days mooed and grazed their way by. Lucious Wilson liked to come in at the end of a morning and stand in the doorway. Once he came a nob early, and I had him step up to the front of the room and give us a song. He couldn’t sing worth shooting, but there was fun in it and we all clapped.

“This is fine, Sue,” he said afterward. “Just fine.”

The trouble came up on the second week. It sat in the lap of one of the bigger ones, who one morning looked me up and looked me down, then said, “You ain’t our teacher. You ain’t any teacher at all.”

I came over to see if she was having trouble with the letters I had set them to practice. It was when I got up close and saw her in her profile, her profile with its little bit of a snarl to it, that I started to smell the trouble that had snuck its way into the room through the chinks in the shed wall while I had stood there in my teacher dress and teacher shoes, while I stood there with my chalk and letters and chair in the corner to sit on. I smelled the trouble, but still I looked down at what she had marked on her slate. She tried to hide it away from me but I saw it before she did. It was a pig dressed as a teacher. Thick of middle and long of snout. A pig to switch off to market. To stick and hang. To have its hairs scalded off. To butcher into its portions of truth. It was easy to see even at a quick glance that she had some talent with an image, that the rendering was fair. I went back and stood in front of them for a minute. Only I wasn’t in my teacher’s dress and my teacher’s shoes any longer, and my old teacher had left me to myself and I could feel the weight of Zinnia’s pig-slop hat on my head.

“She’s crying,” one of them said.

I hadn’t known it. But I was.

The shed had a little door to its back, behind the chalkboard. I stood there and cried a stretch longer then stepped through it. I went around the side of the shed and bent and picked hard at my ankle, then stood and smacked my face into its wall.

She was nice to me afterward, the one who had drawn the pig on her slate. She grew all the way up and got married to a blacksmith who put her into nice dresses and got her a nice carriage to drive around. I used to see her at the church. She died some time ago. Not of anything special.





It wasn’t any length of time after I had left off playing schoolteacher and gone back to the scrub brushes and oatmeal that my employer Lucious Wilson called on me to keep him some company. He was drifting through his days and wanted someone to latch an anchor to them, is what he told me. He also told me I had a glow on me that he admired the sheen of. His children favored me. They had cried when I stopped being their teacher. They were always hollering for more of my stories. My stories that weren’t about black bark or wet dough. Just those good old ones about falling down wells and burning boots and girls with long golden hair. He wanted to know was I committed elsewhere. Did I have any company I was keeping or hoping to keep? Was anyone waiting on me wherever it was I had come up from? He knew the answer to this but asked it anyway. He was young then. He bowed a little with his head when he talked and didn’t look at me too long in the eyes.

He made me this little speech and question as we walked out in the west flatlands where they kept the cattle back then. Everywhere you looked there were beasts working the green. A young bull came up and snuffled Lucious Wilson’s fingers. Turkey buzzards lolled circles above the north woods. There was sun on it all. A good sun. Lord of days, a glow to me, the pig lady from Charlotte County that the water doesn’t want, I thought.

I kept a kind of company with Lucious Wilson for a time then. For a time, after it was dark and his children were asleep and it was only me and the drafts in the halls, I would trip along to my employer’s room and take off my bonnet and, at his bidding, crawl into his bed. Night after night and time after time I would trip up the stair and down the corridor and tap on his door. There was things I thought as I made that passage, and times the trouble that had found me out in that school shed found me out in that passage, and it took me to turn around midway and run back to my own room and hide under the covers and scratch at my ankle with a paring knife. Times as I walked that my legs grew longer and my feet heavier and my chest as big as a barrel and my head the size of a salt block. My hands would swing like slabs of hard stone and I would walk down that corridor, ahead and alongside of myself with a different door in mind. Here I am a-comin’, girls, I thought. I might even have said it aloud. Linus Lancaster said it once in Kentucky as he passed my shut door and went toward the other. So I might have said it too.

One night when I had only made it half the way and was back in my bed and under the covers, Lucious Wilson knocked on my door. He had followed me, he said. He had heard me coming and had had his heart quickened and had had to come after me when I had turned around. He lit the candle and sat down on my bed and pulled the covers down off of my face.

“I’ll take that knife you got under there too,” he said.

I gave it to him. He was a good man. He had that kindness in his eyes and hands and was as soft as a box of baby chicks in his bedroom ways. Lucious Wilson set the knife aside and laid himself down gentle next to me and we both lay there and looked up at the ceiling with our arms crossed over our chests and he said we were lying there like a king and queen of olden days, and I asked him if the olden days were better than the days we had, and he said who could know such a thing?

“I would have rescued you up out of whatever situation it was, Sue,” he said. “I would have brought my rifle and stiffed my jaw and marched into whatever it was and got you out,” he said.

We used a kind of lavender on his shirt linens. I could smell that when he talked to me. You could smell it drifting through that whole house of his. That’s what heaven in the hereafter smells like, I thought, as he laid there next to me and talked.

“Yes, I expect you would have tried, I can see that,” I said. “Only there was no way to know where I was. No road through the woods to find me. Only breadcrumbs to lay on the ground and birds weighting down all the branches above.”

He was quiet after I’d said this and even quieter after what I said next. “And if you had found me, it might not have been me you chose to help.”

The next day in the forenoon he asked me to clasp hands in the parlor with him and pray. Then he asked me to be his wife. Those and their cousins, said right and by the right body, are kind words. I don’t know any kinder. And I told my employer Lucious Wilson that. Then I told him no. I could not stand by him as he had asked. I told him I had been down in hell and that hell was not a place you left no matter how far you hauled your bones away from it. It had found me in his school shed and it had found me in the passage of his house and it would find me again. I was not fit to be his or anyone else’s wife, I told him. I looked him all the time in the eye as I said this. Then I went to pack my bag. Lucious Wilson came and stood in the doorway a long while watching me. He lit his pipe and breathed of it and the smoke came out into the room.

If I could have gathered myself up and turned into smoke then I would have. I would have joined my smoke to his and drifted on out the window and stuck for a while to the floors Lucious Wilson walked on and to the walls where he leaned his hands. There is a fragrance to a good pipe smoke I have always been partial to.

There is a pipe here in this very room I will sometimes pull out and take a chew on. I do not light my pipe. I do not chuck it full of tobacco. I think of the smoke Lucious Wilson put out into the room, even all those years ago now, and how I stood there and worked over my few things and my bag. Some of the times as I chew on my pipe I bite down hard and play it that I did gather myself up that day and did turn to smoke, and that as I drifted he breathed me in then blew me out fresh into his arms. He carried me away then down the hall and out of this world to another where you can put all that you’ve hurt and all that’s hurt you behind like an old cracked honey jar. I expect I was already dreaming some of that as I stood there at my bed. Where would that place be and who would have arms strong enough to carry you there? I expect I thought.

He spoke his soft, good things to me one more time, and one more time I told him no. Then he knocked out his pipe, nodded, and said, “All right now, Sue, I’ll not trouble you longer,” and told me to put my things back on the shelf.





This morning there was a light-skinned colored man come riding down the road that cuts through the middle of Lucious Wilson’s lands and leads right up past the front porch of this little house. He had on a gray hat and gray suit, and his horse wasn’t wanting for being combed and curried. Just like a prince on the palace grounds he looked. You couldn’t have told he was colored but I could see it, in the eyebrows, in the handsome oils of his hair. I was out airing my carcass in the springtime breezes, and when he passed on by me he nodded and lifted his hat and I nodded back, and I said to myself, “Colored man, go safe.”

I did say this.

I don’t ask that you believe me or that you don’t.

A body believes what it will and wants to. There is no rule to any of it. No recipe.

When I was coming up north out of my four-square kingdom, I feared the day and walked the dark, but when I saw folks I fluttered toward them like I was a moth and they were some fine snack of light. Still, there wasn’t any wayfarer would have me long enough to take a good look. What was there to have? Some rags and flaps of skin with curly horns sprouting out of its head? Scary Sue come running up out of Charlotte County. Out of Paradise with its weathers fair.

I come upon a child one of those evenings I was walking. I crossed a creek and had froth on my rags and come on that pretty child playing with a spoon and biscuit and set it to screaming. Not a night later a man with a knife and a coonskin on his head crawled up on me in the dark, but when I stood into the moonlight and he saw what he was stalking he crawled away again.

On the banks of the Ohio River I parlayed in the moonlight with a ferryman who looked me up and looked me down and said he needed no coin from me because I had already paid. I had the black bark in my pocket, he said, and the black bark in my pocket meant pass. It didn’t matter where I went, where I thought I could go. I could change my apron anytime I wanted to and it would still be there waiting in my pocket. He knew. He had two sisters who came up as he was talking and took me back to where they did their washing and scrubbed me down like I was just some old clothes to fret on the board. One of them had a frock to spare, and she dropped it over my head when they were done. The other had a pair of boots to put on my feet, and she put them there. Neither a one of them spoke a word as they did this.

The ferryman had me climb up on his boat directly they were finished with me. After we had crossed and I had set my foot on hard dirt, he told me, “Go safe now, Mother,” and I turned and saw it was Alcofibras sitting there, his hands covered in eyes and raised up off the oars into the mist.

“Where have you taken me, Alcofibras?” I asked him.

“Go on now, Mother,” he said.

I walked for another week, and when I got back to my father’s house I found him and my mother gone and their house with my corner in it burned to the ground. I’d worn my rotten boots out getting there and went barefoot over to Evansville. There was talk everywhere about war. Young men with drink in them bunched up in lines and marched along the thoroughfare. There was considerable discharging of rifles. I told it when they asked that I had walked up out of fire. Not out of Charlotte County, Kentucky. Not out of Paradise and murder.