Laird Hunt - Kind One

When we got to Louisville we found Horace and Ulysses living in a basement, doing night work at the docks. Cleome said she couldn’t live in any basement. Horace and Ulysses were scared to have someone in her condition on their hands, and fretted considerably at first. Still, we waited one week with them in their hole.

As we waited, we talked and read the Bible and told each other stories about how we thought it would be up north. Horace and Ulysses said there was a war coming, that the whole world would be swept away, that we would all be struck down, but we hardly heard them. Our ears were either still back in Paradise or on up the road, but not there. Cleome sat quiet for long stretches. She had a piece of sewing work she would worry at while she sat. She had always been quick with her fingers, but now they were swollen. I rubbed her hands and her feet. She never complained, just said she wanted to get walking and dropping her rocks out of her pockets again. There were times, as I rubbed and her head lolled, and I looked at her belly, that I would give a shiver and hear heavy feet coming down the corridor, but that would pass.

I only went out once, to fetch a woman who had known my mother to look to Cleome. That woman worked in a house next to the one my mother had died in, that I had first been set to work in, that I had taken my first beatings in. After I had gotten her to agree to come, I stood for a while outside that house. It was an ugly thing with cracked boards and a bad roof. A hickory tree stood in front. It had gotten taller over the years. Cleome and I had climbed it one time and waved at our mother, who was sitting at her work by the fire. My mother’s name was Flora Keckley. She was soft with us. She worked every day of her life. He would come home in the evening, drunk or not. Some nights he brought presents, others his fists. I knew I shouldn’t be standing out on the street in broad daylight, but it took me some while to pull myself away from that ugly house with its hickory tree.

The woman came to our hole that night and said she didn’t like the look of Cleome at all. She said the child was carrying wrong and would have to be turned. She worked at this some time then gave up with a shrug.

“You need to stay still,” the woman said.

“She can’t,” I said.

She gave us two packets of herbs and made Cleome eat a paste she had ground up. Two days later we rode five miles out of town buried under cotton bales.

Cleome suffered a great deal during the ride, but she kept talking about letting those rocks drop away. The world had eaten all the sweetness out of her, but there she was lying under the bales, her face next to mine, smiling. The first thing we did when we were out of that cart and hidden in some bushes was pray. We had thirty miles to walk and only darkness to do our walking in.

“The Bible is a cheer when there is darkness about.”

Cleome said this and stood when night had fallen. We held hands, pointed our way forward, and walked.

It was on that first march, through woods wet with spiderwebs and mosses, that it took me to think that the one we had left shackled in Paradise had somehow come to walk behind us, that she was shuffling along just off past our eyes, that, just as we were to her, she was bound to us by unbreakable threads. I knew then that my trick to help her free had not worked, that she had sunk down in that shed after we left her there then risen to follow after us. But by daybreak, with Cleome smiling her smile in the gloaming, the shuffling behind us stopped and I knew it was just walking my face through too many spiderwebs in the dark that had turned my mind to ghosts.

I could not speak for some time after we left Paradise, just lay in the back of the cart like that dead thing and tried to remember what had always once seemed to me to be so beautiful about the old blue sky and its clouds. As a girl I had lain in the grasses of Paradise with daisies in my hair and looked up at the clouds. I had shut my eyes with those daisies in my hair and wished that my sister and me could live up amongst them. Lying in the back of the cart I could hear the breeze blowing across those grasses I lay in as a girl. With my eyes shut I could feel the daisies sweet and soft in my hair. I could not make the blue sky and the clouds above me look like anything except the witness to what should never have been allowed to happen. The witness that had just looked on and on and on.

When we got close to Louisville, and Prosper had stopped the horses under a tree to rest them, I told him that now he had been to the place where his mother and his aunt had faced their travails. He had been to a place of hurt and murder, to a place where we had suffered and handed out suffering, to a place I had never thought to see again.

“Who is Ginestra Lancaster?” Prosper asked.

There is a scar on my face that leads from my left temple to the bottom of my left cheek. It was not allowed to heal properly and even all these years later it looks raw. When he was a small boy, and one or the other of us was sad and looking for comfort, Prosper took the habit of tracing that scar, gently, with his finger, like it was the trail he needed to follow to get us where we needed to go. Sitting in that cart, under that tree, I took up his big hand and ran his long finger down that scar and said, “Ginestra Lancaster is the one who gave me that.”

Prosper sat silent with his finger on my cheek. There were frogs at work in some nearby pond and big black dragonflies haunted the trees. Prosper looked off into the green and blue and ran his finger up past my eye then back down again.

“And why are we looking for Ginestra Lancaster now?” he asked.

“Because I have something to return to her,” I said.

“Hate returns hate, Aunt Z,” said Prosper.

“Yes,” I said.

I took his hand and held my face against it for a long time.

It had been given to me to lead us the thirty miles to the crossing place. I was young and had my good young eyes, and there was no longer any shuffling along behind us, but on our second night I let us get lost. Cleome had asked to sit for a moment, so I had let her sit and both of us fell asleep the second we touched ground. When we woke I did not know how long we had slept, and fearing the light that might come at any minute hurried us off on our way. We had each of us had a dream while we slept, and I could see the trouble of it in Cleome’s eyes and feel the trouble of it in myself, and in this trouble and hurry I took us off on the wrong way.

How long we wandered as I tried to retrieve our lost path I don’t know. Clouds hung low and the wood was thick. Once I fell into a gully and tore my dress on a thorn slick. Cleome caught her hair on an oak branch. An owl came swooping by. Near sunrise it took me to run. I don’t know why it came upon me that we must. We ran and crossed a road and had just gotten over it safely to the other side when a cart came along. Cleome breathed loud beside me and had been struck by a cough. I told her to cover her mouth and lie low, and she smiled her little smile at me and did her best. I don’t know why I had felt we needed to run, what had frightened me. There were two white men sitting at the front of the cart, one of them looking sharp and holding a rifle. In the back of the cart sat another man with a rifle and beside him a white man wrapped in chains. Just as they were passing Cleome coughed loud, and all four of them turned their heads. It was only one of them who found my eyes in the grasses, the one dressed in chains. I did not move and I did not blink, and the man saw me and I saw him. It was Bennett Marsden, friend to our dead owner. His lips curled a little and his eyebrow went up, then he looked away and the cart rolled on.