Laird Hunt: Kind One

“Well, open it,” my father told me, even though I had just been born. I opened it and fetched out a slip of paper had on it a single word.

“Lucious,” my father told my mother when he was awake to the world again and had got back to what wasn’t yet quite a house.

“He will be called Joseph as we planned. As he already is,” said my mother.

“Lucious is his name,” my father said.

“You just fell asleep and had a dream.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“His name is Joseph.”

“Lucious is what he will be called.”

My father said it one more time, and then he took up his musket and fired it out the window. And that was that, and when in after years I complained about my name no one knew how to say or spell, they would both of them tell me about my father’s vision. Didn’t stop me from hating it though. The way a child can hate a thing. Hate it to crying, to kicking, to gnashing of tumbledown milk teeth. You will understand why when one Sunday we passed a farm where a colored woman, first I had ever seen, was bent over in an oat field, I wrote my hated name down on a piece of paper and wrapped it up in a package and tied it with string. I waited until my parents weren’t likely to look for me and walked four miles back to that farm and handed it to the colored woman, who took it from me without a word.

“My name is Joseph. I don’t want your name,” I told her. She had green eyes and fine, long eyebrows and wore feathers and strips of string in her hair and was the strangest and handsomest woman I had ever seen.

“I gave it back,” I told my father that evening at supper.

“Gave back what?” my father said.

“My name.”

“To that red Indian girl?”

“Was she an Indian?”

That is the first part of the story of my name, and I have told it twice in my life to listeners hadn’t heard it before. The first time was during the war, when I was sick in love and there was a hurt soldier resting up in the little house I still have here on my property. He had been home to see his parents and was returning to the fight and had had a wound go bad on him. I was sick in love, and the one I was sick in love with was tending his wound and looking soft at him who was curly-haired and green-eyed and not at me who was just an already-old man owned some beasts and land, and when I went down there it was to try and see what it was that soldier had that I didn’t. Took about ten seconds to see that he had everything. Everything I was missing. Going back down to war. Probably to get killed. Thunder and glory. Sulfur and bayonet. Clear road to the beyond.

He was young and sick and asked me to hold his hand, grip it tight. I held his hand and told him the story of my name. He had his fever and didn’t hear it. I know because when the fever broke a week later, I asked him if he remembered what my name was supposed to have been, should have been, and when I smiled and asked this, he looked at me strange. So I bade him farewell and sent him down to rejoin his regiment on one of my good mules. As he rode off, the one I was sick in love with and who wasn’t sick or any other ways in love with me whispered out at him, “Good-bye, Joseph.”

She was the other I told the story to. I told it to her not a season ago. In that same little house, which for the fifty years after that soldier’s leaving I saw to it was her house. Of course it is now no longer her house because she is also gone. Vanished up the chimney with its ash.

“I have always liked that name of yours,” she said. She was old and stout and rattled like a boiler, but she said it and dug a tear out of my eye.

“Call me Joseph,” I said. “Call me Joseph and I will call you Ginny, and we will be called by our true names.”

“My name is Sue. Add on Scary if you want.”

“I never called you Scary.”

“And your name is Lucious.”

“Why wouldn’t you have me?”

She was wearing a ring woven out of purple thread on one of her fingers. She did not give an answer. Had already given it. Lifetime ago. She pointed with that finger to a large, thick envelope with a Chicago send-back address printed on it in neat handwriting that was foreign to me. Then she pointed at a thicker stack of papers sitting near it, which she had covered in her own hand.

“There’s true stories there if you care to read them,” she said. “Mine and hers both. You know who it is I mean.”

Then she asked me if after she was gone I would send her stack, along with a word or two of my own if I wanted, to the Chicago address the thick envelope had sailed down to her from.

“Don’t you die on me, Sue,” I said.

“Swear to me you will send it,” she said.

“I swear it,” I said.

“Lucious. Lucious Wilson,” she said.

There is snow come up as I have told the story of my name. Snow and small smacks of hail on the roof of this little house.

I went then I came back then I went then I came back again. In going I came and in coming I went. In that way I didn’t need to see an inch of my road and might as well have took out my own eyes. But here they still are — candy jellies, each afloat, each in its own glass jar.