Та-Нехаси Коутс - The Water Dancer

“They say he went out to check on his horse,” my father said. “He loved that damn thing, but when he got out into it, he could not tell a stable from the smokehouse. I walked out on the porch that same day, and that wind, by God, I tell you I couldn’t see my own hand held out in front of me.”

“Why ain’t he send his boy?” Maynard asked.

“He’d let nearly all of them loose the summer before. Took them up to Baltimore—he has kin up there—and left them to their own devices. Poor fools. Doubt they made it a week.”

At that moment Maynard spotted me outside the doorframe.

“What are you doing out there, Hi?” he said. “Come freshen up the fire.”

I walked in and looked to my father, who regarded me as he so often did those days—as though he was between two notions and could not decide which to give voice to. He had settled on a particular smile for me—a half smile held frozen in a macabre rictus. I doubt he meant it to seem as sinister as it did. I don’t think he much thought about it. Howell Walker was not a reflective man, as much as he might have thought he should be one, having been born to a generation who fashioned themselves after the Revolutionary scholars of their grandfathers’ era—Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. All over the house of Lockless were the instruments of science and discovery—great maps of the world, electrostatic generators, and the library that had so often been my home. But the maps were rarely referenced, the devices mostly used for party tricks, and if the volumes were in any way limber it was due to my hand. My father’s reading was constrained to useful things— De Bow’s Review , The Christian Intelligencer, The Register . To him, books were fashion, signatures of pedigree and status, which marked him off from the low whites of the county with their dirt-floor hovels and paltry homesteads of corn and wheat. But what did it mean to find me, a slave, dreaming amid those books?

My father had begun his family at a later age than most. He was now in his seventieth year and losing his vigor. His blue eyes, always intense and regarding, were encroached by the bags beneath them and the crow’s-feet extending out from them. There is so much in the eyes—the flash of rage, the warmth of joy, the pooling of sadness—and all of this my father had lost. I suppose he was a handsome man once. Perhaps I just like to think of him that way. But what I remember from that day, along with those lost eyes, are the worry lines carved into his face, the hair unkempt and swept back, his beard everywhere and wiry. He still had the dignified dress of a gentleman of Quality, the silk stockings, the many layers—shirt, vest, bright waistcoat, black frock. But he was the last of a particular species, and the dying was written all over him.

“Races tomorrow, Daddy,” said Maynard. “I’m going to show them this time. I’m going to put a passel on that horse Diamond, and bring home the whole acre.”

“You needn’t show them anything, May,” my father said. “They don’t matter. All that truly matters is right here.”

“Hell I don’t,” said Maynard, flashing anger. “That man had me tossed from the jockey club, then pulled a pistol on me. I’m going to show them. I’m going to ride out in that new Millennium chaise and remind them…”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should avoid it all.”

“I’m going. And damn them. Somebody gotta stand for the Walker name.”

My father turned back toward the fire with a barely perceptible sigh.

“Yes indeed,” Maynard said. “I think tomorrow will be something.”

Through the shadows I saw my father, exhausted by the need of his first-born son, give me a pained and sideways look and then tug at his beard, and this was a gesture I could read. Guard your brother, it said, and I knew it for I had seen it for half my life.

“Best start getting ready for tomorrow,” Maynard said. “Hi, go check on the horses.”

I walked down the steps into the Warrens and then out to the tunnel. I inspected the horses and then returned to the house the way I came. Maynard was gone, but I saw my father still there, seated before the fire. It was his custom, sometimes, to fall asleep there until Roscoe woke him up and prepared him for bed. Roscoe was not around. I moved to put another log on the fire.

“Let it die, Hiram,” my father said. “I’m almost finished here.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Anything I can get you?”

“No,” he said.

I asked if Roscoe was still attending.

“No. I let him go early,” he said.

Roscoe had two young sons that lived ten miles west of us, and whenever he could, he went over to see them. Sometimes, if my father was in the mood, he’d release Roscoe early from his duties to spend a few extra hours with them.

“Why don’t you sit with me a moment,” my father said.

It was an unusual request to make to a tasking man, but was not so unusual between us, at moments when it was only us, and each day it seemed there were more moments like this. He’d sold off half the kitchen staff in the past year. The smithy and the carpentry workhouse were empty now. Carl, Emmanuel, Theseus, all the other men who once tasked there had been sent off Natchez-way. The ice-house had been fallow for two years. One maid, Ida, worked the entire house, which meant the order that I remembered from childhood was no more, but more than that, meant that the warm smile of Beth and the laugh of Leah and the sad, vacant eyes of Eva were no more. In the kitchen, there was a new girl, Lucille, who seemed totally lost, and so she often suffered Maynard’s rages. Lockless had begun to feel desolate and gray, and it was not just Lockless but all the manors along the Goose, now drained of their vigor as the heart of the country shifted west.

I took my seat, the same that Maynard had abandoned, and for a few long minutes, my father said nothing. He just stared into the fire, which was dying, so that all I could now see was a diminishing yellow trace on his face.

“You will mind your brother, won’t you,” he said.

“Yessir,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

And then there was a brief pause before he spoke again.

“Hiram, I know that there is not much I have been permitted to give you,” he said. “But I believe that in what I have been permitted to give you, I have made it known how high you sit in my esteem. It is not fair, I know it, none of it is fair. But I have been damned to live in this time when I must watch my people carried off, across the bridge and into God knows where.”

Again, he paused and shook his head. Then he stood, and walked over to the mantel to turn up the lamp-light, so that the parlor portraits and ivory busts of our forefathers were now illuminated in the flickering shadows.

“I’m old,” he continued. “I can’t reconstruct myself for this new world. I will pass with this Virginia, and these troubled times will fall to Maynard, which means they will fall to you. You have to save him, son. You have to protect him. I don’t just mean tomorrow at race-day. There is so much coming, so much trouble coming for us all, and Maynard, whom I love more than anything, he is not ready. Mind him, son. Mind my boy.”

He paused and looked directly at me. “Mind your brother, do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

And we sat there for perhaps another thirty minutes, until my father announced his retirement for the evening. I took my leave and went down into the Warrens, to my room. I sat on the edge of my bed and thought of that day my father called me up from the fields—the day he’d smiled and flipped the copper coin my way. Everything about my life flowed from that decision. It kept me from seeing the worst of our condition. Almost any tasking man at Lockless would have traded his life for mine. But there was a weight of being so close to them, the weight that Thena had tried to warn me about, but something more, the crushing weight of seeing how the Quality truly lived, in all their luxury, and how much they really took from us.