Laird Hunt - Kind One

“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.

THAT DAY WE SAW OFFBennett Marsden I went back into the kitchen like I’ve already said. I had on my dress and had my clean hands, and because I thought what we had been cooking up for Bennett Marsden was still sitting on the stove, I stood up straight when I got to the table and I told Zinnia to sit. I told her to sit, and she looked at me like there was lightning and thunder to come, but she sat. Then I told Cleome to walk down the hall to Linus Lancaster’s room and fetch a wallet out of a drawer she would find half hidden in the chifforobe. Cleome said she would not walk into Linus Lancaster’s room, and who was I to be handing out orders. I told her again. Zinnia nodded. Cleome went and fetched it. When she got it to the table I took it from her, told her to sit, and opened it up past its few notions to a portrait in a leather frame. That was a photographic portrait of a lady wearing a hat.

“Linus Lancaster, my late husband who is gone now to his pigs and glory, liked to show us this,” I said. I showed it up to Cleome then to Zinnia. “He liked to hold this up to us like I’m holding this up to you now, and he liked to say everything he’d ever loved in this world and everything he’d ever hoped to bring to his piece of paradise was in this frame. This was usually after his singing nights. When he had been at the jug. Do you remember this?”

“All right,” said Zinnia. She said this without moving her lips, without moving her eyes, which had lingered only a moment on the portrait, from mine. Cleome said nothing.

“All right,” I said, then pulled the first piece of tin up out of the frame and revealed the second behind it and held it up in its turn. Cleome and Zinnia looked at each other then at me.

“I found this second one just this winter,” I said.