Steve Erickson: Arc d'X

ON AN APRIL NIGHT ALMOST midpoint in the Eighteenth Century, in the county of Orange and the colony of Virginia, Jacob Pollroot tasted his death a moment before swallowing it. He had, then, a moment to spit it out and save himself. This moment was lost not because he was slow-witted but because he’d become a monster of appetites; his had not been a life of spitting out things. The taste was sweet, slyly familiar. He’d tasted it before, in some Indian campaign of his youth or some night with one of his black women. But he had only the time now to look up from the stew that was his dinner, gaze at the house around him, and see through the steam of the poison his slave Evelyn standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

He raised his hands to his throat. The pain began almost immediately in the pit of his stomach, widening in a circle to his bowels below and his brain above. He pushed away from the table and lurched across the room; Evelyn watched without glee or concern. “Jesus you’ve killed me,” Jacob wailed, crashing into a wall of dishes. For a moment he lay shuddering on the floor. Some would later say his hideous noises were the leakage of a black life hissing out of every orifice.

Evelyn walked up to the body. She stood over it long enough that she might have been contemplating giving it a good kick. She looked up to the faces of the other slaves in the windows, who were staring in stupefaction not, she knew, simply at Jacob Pollroot’s death, but her own.

At Evelyn’s trial there was a thorough recounting of Jacob’s barbarities, and testimony as to Evelyn’s constant debasement at Jacob’s hands and his savage treatment of his slaves in general. All this was accepted not as reasons that might justify Jacob’s murder, but rather as the motives that proved Evelyn had done the deed. Evelyn herself said nothing. She sat throughout the trial as impassively as she’d watched Jacob topple across his dinner. She wasn’t invited to speak; her trial wasn’t seen as a legal right extended to a person to defend herself — since by Virginia law Evelyn wasn’t a person — but as an object lesson for a system that occasionally needed one. The case certainly created alarm throughout the county. The court found Evelyn guilty and sentenced her to be burned at the stake, once the spring rains stopped and the town could find wood dry enough for it.

The rest of Jacob Pollroot’s slaves would later create the legend that on the first of May when Evelyn was torched alive, she received the inferno’s lust with the same stoic self-possession as she’d received Jacob’s so many nights. But it was a difficult legend to maintain in the face of Evelyn’s screams, so terrible they stunned even those who had witnessed such executions before. For days afterward the pale and shaken townspeople still remembered the screams, transparent portholes in the flames through which could be seen Evelyn’s aghast face. Her ashes smoked for hours in the twilight. The smell of them carried in people’s hair and clothes, and the cloud of smoke rose high into the Virginia sky, visible for miles around.

It was visible in the next county. A Virginia squire driving his wagon down the muddy road toward his plantation looked up to watch it rise above the mountain. A dark knowing murmur swept through his own slaves riding in the wagon and walking alongside; on the hills and in the fields slaves stopped their work to look up at the smoke. At that moment the squire, hearing the dangerous din of their black prayers, wanted nothing more than a strong wind that would scatter the smoke, though a full gale force would not disperse its memory. Next to him on the wagon seat the squire’s five-year-old son watched the smoke too. Into the night the little boy smelled it. He smelled it in his food and his bath. In the air outside his bedroom window that should have been ripe with the scent of spring rain, he smelled nothing but the burning body of the black female slave. He woke in the middle of the night vomiting; and lying in bed the next day, depleted and delirious, his five-year-old head was filled with excruciating visions: staring into the nothingness above him, he waited for the woman’s ashes to fall from the sky, to clot the branches of the trees and hang from the rafters of the house like black snow. The boy’s name was Thomas.

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, down the hall from Thomas’ boyhood room, as the smoke of revolution settled over the countryside, a nine-year-old slavegirl called Sally stood in another room watching her mistress’ last hours. Along with Sally were her mother, brother and most of the other houseslaves. In bed a dying young woman glided in and out of consciousness, gripping her husband’s hand. The heavy blue curtains were closed to the sun; the dank smell of childbirth and the woman’s dying mixed with the fragrances of lilac and musk, which a bedchamber slave frantically wafted through the room until Sally thought she’d gag. Thomas finally wrested himself from his stunned bewilderment. “Please,” he whispered, so low Sally could barely hear him, “no more perfume.” It was the only thing anyone had said in hours, and the stricken husband returned to his silent vigil.

In fact the mistress of the house had been weak and in poor health as long as Sally could remember, and had lain on this particular edge of death for some time. The smell of placenta and blood that still hung in the bedchamber was from the birth of the mistress’ third daughter. Throughout the recent weeks visitors had come to the house from across Virginia not to offer best wishes to the sick woman but to pay respects to the departed one, since news traveled prematurely that she had already died. All summer Thomas walked the halls of the house in a trance. Racked first with the sorrow of his impending loss and the denial of its inevitability, he’d nearly come to that point where such denial becomes anticipation, as a consequence of which such sorrow becomes guilt. His hand perpetually in hers, he was both ready to pull her back as she was sucked into the afterworld and to squeeze her fingers goodbye in his encouragement that she go.

At night in their quarters the slaves talked about what would happen to them when the mistress was gone. It wasn’t that they feared their treatment at the hands of the master. The master treated the slaves better than the mistress, actually; no one had ever seen him beat a slave or order a slave beaten. Once in town Sally watched with awe as Thomas, who at more than six feet tall towered over most men, seized a stick from a handyman who was beating a slave. Thomas neither bought slaves nor sold them; he’d inherited his from his father. But most of the slaves belonged to the mistress when she married Thomas, and over the years of their marriage the master had remained incomprehensible to them when not appearing simply eccentric. He was dreamy and distracted and perhaps, for all anyone could tell, a bit addled — a lawyer who never had any clients, a tinkerer who built peculiar contraptions with arcane functions. To the nine-year-old slavegirl Sally there was something godlike about his calm. She was mesmerized by his immaculate silence, his chaste reflectiveness. The rest of the slaves were more unsettled than reassured by his strange otherness. They didn’t know what to make of it when Thomas occasionally rode off to Williamsburg to propose laws that declared no one would own any more slaves.

Thus, standing at the deathbed of the mistress on this September afternoon, the watching slaves were as much distressed by the uncertainty of the moment as by its gravity. When the sun finally fell and the blue curtains were pulled aside from the window, the mistress woke from her stupor with a start. “Tom,” she said calmly, “I want to tell my children goodbye.”