“Thank you for your service to this country, Mr. Johnson. You’re free to go,” the Shadow Men said.
That was it. No money. No care for his blindness. Not even a medal. They left him on the side of the road like an unwanted dog.
Just like the man in the hat had promised, he was free of the Shadow Men. At a price.
And there was Memphis Campbell, walking around with his friends, not paying a price at all. Out there healing up white gangsters—yes, Bill had heard the rumors—but he wouldn’t even spare some for a friend. For one of his own. Every day, Bill swallowed down his bitterness. Now it came burning up inside him. To hell with Memphis Campbell.
While the house slept, Bill treaded carefully down the hall. He’d walked it so many times he could feel it. He was inside the boys’ room now—he knew by smell. He could hear Isaiah snoring. Carefully, he lowered his hand, placing it on the boy’s arm, hoping Isaiah would not wake. Easy, Bill. Easy, now, he said to himself, just like he used to say to Samson all those long years ago. But he couldn’t quite draw it out. Something wouldn’t let him. He wanted to howl. Rage. Tear something down. “Take,” he muttered. “Take, take, take.” The connection seized Bill like a pair of strong hands. Bill knew in his gut that wherever this was pulling him was a bad place. A feeling crawled over his skin like biting fire ants. And then a familiar face loomed before him.
“Hello, old friend,” the King of Crows said. His dark eyes were bottomless wells of terrors beyond imagining. They were in that forest again. The sick moon bled into the empty black night. When the King spoke, his razor-sharp teeth gleamed. “Do you think you can take what’s mine? You, of all people, should know better. Have you forgotten me so soon? I will colonize your soul with fear until, in your despair, you’ll think my yoke a boon. So you wish to see, do you? Very well. I shall grant your wish.”
Inside that world between worlds, the King of Crows raked his sharp fingernails across Bill’s face. Bill fell back as if burned, breaking the spell with Isaiah.
“My eyes!” he gasped. When he blinked, he saw terrible things: A husband slitting his wife’s throat. A band of white rangers taking the scalps of Indian children as they tried to run to safety. The hungry dead winking from a cornfield where they feasted on the mutilated carcass of a fly-ridden cow.
“Uncle Bill?” Isaiah said sleepily from his bed. “That you? Whatsa matter?”
Bill hurried from the room, tapping his way back to his own. He sat on the cot breathing heavily. He shut his eyes and the terrible scenes got worse—hangings and lynchings and men blown apart by war. So he stayed awake, fearing each blink until finally, by morning, the spell was done. Nothing permanent, then. Just a reminder of the King’s power. Of what he could do.
THE DEAD
The history of the land is a history of blood.
In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming.
It’s all in the telling.
The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow.
Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness.
Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.) The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead.
The land remembers everything, though.
It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting.
The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood.
Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded.
The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb.
All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us.
We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing.
One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis.
Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever!
Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun. The young run toward the horizon, proclaiming their optimism to the blue skies: “I am working toward greatness.”
The girl told no starts the engine of her brother’s abandoned plane: “I am working toward greatness.”
The family steps onto the planks of Ellis Island, hearts turned toward Liberty’s torch: “Kaam kar raha hoon.”