Laird Hunt - Kind One

It took us until the middle of the afternoon to reach the fine house of Lucious Wilson, deep in the green cornfields of Clinton County, Indiana, and this time, when we had reached our destination, I found I did not need to stay in the cart, but walked straight up to the front door and knocked. My knock was answered by a small white woman in her middle years, who smiled up at me. I had been prepared for her to shut the door in my face or to tell me that the servants’ entrance was around the side or to treat me or Prosper poorly in some other way, but she did not. In fact, she turned her smile over to Prosper, who had stayed with the wagon. She even gave him a wave.

“I am here to speak to Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I said. “I do beg your and his pardon for any trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” she said. “Will you come in?”

It was as fine a home on the inside as it had looked on the outside. The floors had been stained and swept clean and there were no cobwebs in the corners. Books lined the walls, and there was a long curl to the banister that led up the stairs. The woman offered me a comfortable chair in the parlor, but I stood in the entrance hall with my travel hat in my hand. While I waited, I looked at a piece of stitchwork made by someone who had known her business. The stitchwork had a silver frame and a border of flowers. In the middle of it, curled around a sleeping child, was the Lord’s Prayer.

“You will sit with me as we speak,” said Mr. Lucious Wilson when he came. There wasn’t any question to it, so I followed him into the parlor and sat. His daughter, for that was who the woman was, brought us cool blackberry tea, then went out the front door and carried a glass of it to Prosper and told him to take his cart over near the shed where the horses could stand out of the sun.

Lucious Wilson was every bit as old as I was and had some trouble with his breath. When he had caught it, he said, “I saw that fellow the other day and thought he was white, now I can see that he is not.”

“My nephew.”

“I expect I would have to see you stand together.”

“There is a resemblance. Some have said he takes a good deal after me.”

“You look like you’ve been on the road a spell.”

“Yes sir, I have.”

“And where have you come from?”

“Chicago.”

“Went there once. Long ago. Before the big buildings. What I wanted to ask you was where you come from.”

“Below the river,” I said. It was the simplest way to say it.

“Kentucky,” he said.

I nodded. We sat quietly. The house had many a modest creak. We breathed and listened to them. Or I listened to them. After a time, he spoke.

“You were down there with our Sue, weren’t you?”

“Sue, sir?”

“Ginny. Ginestra Lancaster. Down there with her.”

Lucious Wilson shuddered just the tiniest bit as he said this. I did not shudder, not even that small amount, nor did I answer, but thought of the stitchwork in the entrance hall. I had the Lord’s Prayer on my own wall in Prosper’s house in Bronzeville. We said the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday at my church. The Lord’s Prayer, I had always found, could never be used up. All I ever had to do was lay my eyes or mind on it to feel refreshed. With the Lord’s Prayer, I was stronger than it all.

“Isn’t that what this is? Isn’t that who you and that nephew of yours looks like a white boy are?” he said.

There wasn’t anything mean in his voice, only a harshness because of the breath that was leaving him, which was the same breath that was leaving me, that is leaving all of us on this earth.

“A place in Charlotte County. By a stream. The owner, Linus Lancaster, was a pig farmer. There were several of us to start. Then just a few. We called it Paradise,” I said.

“Paradise?”

“A greensward out of the old days. I have something to return to her, something she gave me down there. I got my use out of it and have never touched it since. There’s more on the coil. I should have left the whole and not just part of it with her in the long ago.”

He squinted his eyes, raised a long white eyebrow. I reached into my bag and pulled it out, held it up.

He cleared his throat, took a breath, nodded.

“You know that is her needlework you have been looking at over on the wall yonder,” he said.

“Miss Ginny’s?”

“Sue’s. She hasn’t been called Ginestra Lancaster in fifty years.”

“Sue’s,” I said.

“Would you say it with me?”

“Yes sir.”

So we bowed our heads and said the Lord’s great prayer together, then he stood and told me where she lived.

Cleome’s time came as we were crossing a ditch next to a barley field gone badly to seed. It flung her down onto the hard dirt and would not let her rise. They had told me there would be a woman who could help us at the crossing place, but it was still some miles away and I did not dare leave.

She smiled, did my younger sister Cleome, in between her screams. She said the rocks were still falling out of her pockets, that she felt lighter each minute, that everything now was soft and sweet. She pushed and she pushed. “Pray with me,” she said near the end. I put my face against hers and I did. “Sing to me,” she said. I gathered her into my arms and sang. There was a song she wanted from her girlhood. A song from our mother. “Yes,” she said as I sang it. She was as brave in that ditch as anything that ever walked through this world.

I left the child in the pool of blood it had made and went on to the crossing place. When I got there, they said they thought it was two of us. I said it was three, maybe more, maybe all of Kentucky. When I said this, I turned on my heel and ran all the way back to that ditch. The child lay untouched. I cut the cord, wrapped him up, then covered my sister with rocks. Then I realized what I had done and pulled every one of those rocks off of her and hid her in some brush. I sat there beside that brush a long time until the baby in my arms began to cry. At the crossing place they looked us up and down for a long time. “Where is the mother?” they asked me.

“I made us run,” I said. “I got us lost.”

The little house Lucious Wilson had given to Ginny Lancaster sat one mile away from his big one at the end of a stand of shagbark hickory and giant white oak. There was a fine field behind it and a few brave flowers poking up out of a black bed on the front lawn. This time I had Prosper get out of the wagon with me and come to the front door. I stood there looking at its fresh yellow paint for a long time without knocking then took the spool with its few last lengths of purple thread out of my bag and set it down on the porch. It didn’t look like much. Any kind of a wind would have blown it out into the field.

“All right,” I said.

“All right, Aunt Zinnia,” said Prosper.

We were almost to the cart when the door behind us opened.

I could not see her at first, there in the gloom.

All those years, all those miles.

“Please,” she said. “Come back. Come in.”

A woman gave me a blanket for the child, said he looked strong, asked me if I planned to keep him.

“Keep him?” I said. “He is my nephew. He is my own.”

They put oar to water at dusktime, took us out across the darkening waters. The child cried but a little as we went toward the lights on the far bank. I named him when we were halfway home.