Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Once they reached the end of the street, the driver tugged the reins in such a way as to have the horse spin them a half circle onto the opposite side of the street headed back in the direction whence they had come. The horse snorted in acknowledgment— All right, I can do this —and they started the slow search, the driver leaning forward, numbers in his mouth. They soon arrived at the end of the street, the very point from which they had started out. The driver drew the horse to the side of road and pulled himself erect on the platform.

We ain’t getting nowhere, the driver said. It sposed to be right in here somewheres but ain’t nan sign. Best I dig it up for you. The driver speaking in a tender voice, comically unsuited to the circumstances. He hopped down from the platform, the most natural act in the world. A scarecrow stitched up in somebody’s dark-colored hand-me-downs.

Wait, Tabbs said. Lacking the driver’s speed and agility, he spun his body 180 degrees and began to work his way down from the cab — the driver did not offer to assist him — backward like a man descending a ladder, one foot then the other. He reached the running board, pushed his weight off, and took a short hop into the dirt. Stood there in the hot rough road carefully positioning his hat on his head, low enough on the brow to block the sun but not too low to block vision. Must see what he must see. Turned to face the driver and stood looking at him. The horse was still moving, wanted to go, stamping one hoof after the next into the red dirt.

Some houses yonder over that rise there. The driver nodded his head toward the opposite side of the plateau a hundred yards off where the forest began again. Where the road don’t carry. Ain’t nowhere else it can be. He took the reins and began wrapping them around a post.

No, Tabbs said. I can go.

It’s pestering me now, the driver said. Clearly disappointed, at a loss, empty-handed, despite his best efforts. I knows where we be. Best I go.

No, Tabbs said.

The driver stood looking at Tabbs with the reins in his hands, the length of them forming a half loop from the dirt road to the horse’s long mouth. His look a reproach to Tabbs’s abruptness, possible rudeness. Tabbs stared right into the man’s irises, clear living tissue, so that all else of him disappeared. The whole of the man in one (two), round windows, maps. An easy walk up the rise, the driver said. You needin directions from there? His voice was pleasant and measured, but his tone was less than welcoming.

No, Tabbs said. I can manage. He removed a smattering of coins from his leather pouch and paid the driver, adding a generous half-dollar tip.

The driver stared sullenly at the coins circling his palm as if they were some foreign and invasive growth, boils or pox, popping up from beneath the skin or embellishing it. He closed his fingers over the coins, a fist, not happy to take them. Slowly lifted his face toward Tabbs. How long you gon be? he asked. Eyes growing tighter, clearly irritated that after having driven this passenger two miles out he now had to wait.

I can’t say. Tabbs quick to answer back, deliberately gruff even though the driver commanded respect. He started for the rise, stepping easily over the broken ground, his feet properly equipped with old sturdy water-repelling boots hardened with mud he had purchased from an alabaster native. Thirty paces out, he turned his head and looked back over his shoulder at the driver, the latter still standing in the same spot, resolutely holding the reins in one hand, the coins fisted in the other. Studying Tabbs, his gaze torn, wavering between one instinct and another. Wouldn’t surprise Tabbs a bit if he found the man gone upon his return.

He started up the rise on a narrow footpath cutting through thick forest, his lungs working. This was the South.

Sometimes he could pick out the human arrangements with quick ease; other times he had to work to see them. Caught (glimpse) a man so thin, such a featherweight, that the slightest puff of wind lifted him a full six feet above the earth, sailed him along, and settled him somewhere else yards away. Tabbs dashed along rows of trees endangered (doomed) by so many varieties of birds, headed for an Anglo-Saxon native (no mistaking him) standing a few yards off. A small man hugging a small basket at his waist. No shoes, his tattered clothing revealing patches of skin not unlike the red dirt in color and texture, a man growing up out of the soil. He snatched up his head at Tabbs’s approach, eyes bulging like two round marbles. Tabbs only went so close, leaving a strategic four feet between them.

Suh, you need one of these apples, the man said. He held out the small basket for Tabbs’s inspection. Green crab apples. They never known a worm.

Tabbs took two of them and paid the man in the smallest denomination of coin he could produce from his leather pouch.

Thanks yese kindly, suh. He dropped his head forward until his chin touched his chest.

Tabbs came right out with it. Do you know where I might find Teaberry Lane?

Old or new?

Tabbs unaware until now that he had a choice. Old, he said, guessing.

Yonder. The man pointed to the other side of the plateau where the forest began, then pocketed his money and scurried away.

Tabbs took some enjoyment in seeing the alabaster this way, face flushed from exerting in the heat. Defeated and under constant watch, the Anglo-Saxon natives were no longer masters in their own homes. In fact, they were as unsure as he was, strangers in a new land under foreign occupation. (Crab apples in his pockets.) They had numerous crimes to answer for, crimes against his people. Not a day passed when he was not struck by a desire — his own stiffening rage — to take one of the hard alabaster faces and smash it into powder. A desire that always flitted nimbly through him and evaporated, overwhelmed by the reality of the cruel necessities of war. (The planters were all dead.) The phase of fear fast replacing the state of fury.

Looked ahead into the white band of the morning and continued across the red span of the plateau, brushing his hands free of red dirt, refusing to break his stride. Trod his way carefully past sweaty Negro women carrying baskets on their heads (they were perfectly beyond his reach), moving on to the opposite side of the plateau and into forest again. Started his descent, gravity pulling him into speed. Easy now or tumble down the rise. Land leveled out — running, slowing into normalcy — and he found himself upon another road that seemed to begin and end nowhere. Worked on steadying his breathing. Heaved like something had burst in his chest. He went the way all the traffic seemed to be headed. Careful about where he placed his feet. Mounds of animal droppings like golden stones in the sunlight. Cowbells followed one another into the distances of the afternoon. The shunt and pull of animals and vehicles. (Strange how the things of this world — horses, mules, oxen, dogs, donkeys — afford flight from it.) Mule-drawn two-wheeled carts and horse-drawn four-wheeled wagons stumbling along the plateau. Hard to believe that these skeletal animals were (once) living creatures. Hard to believe they simply hadn’t upped and quit by now. All their drivers could do to navigate their vehicles through the ruddy ruts and puddles the rain had made — he recalled no rain — and maneuver around people who bothered neither to stop walking nor to move out the way. Had he found it? Was this road the elusive (Old) Teaberry Lane? Sitting very erect in their saddles, ten or twelve mounted soldiers — the victors, the conquerors — strode through on impressive stallions. Other soldiers walking behind them, meandering in loose formation, their rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, their heavy boots sinking into the red mud.