Natashia Deon - Grace

The same way trousers needed suspenders, instead of finding harmony in a pair that fits. We’re not the same, they tell us. We’re different, they say. We don’t fit together.

The world is too big and too strange now, they believe, and without a conflict or war holding us up, leaders are uneasy. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders and they need straps. Without them, they feel something is wrong. They could be exposed as naked at any time. Vulnerable. They need to feel secure in something familiar and taut. The strain of one thing pulling against another. This is what the new America needs to feel normal, with the wrong question being asked over and over again, “How can we have peace without suspenders?” Not, “How can we have harmony and not need suspenders?” A silly question to too many, so we get more suspenders. And now, our men and their strain are inseparable.

JACKSON NEVER DID finish Josey’s path out back and never started Sissy’s windows.

He told Josey, “You ask, but I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t wake up in the morning saying to myself, ‘I’m not gon’ do nothing today.’ I think I have time to, or I don’t think about time ’til night falls and it’s too late and all I want to do is go back to sleep. So I don’t know what’s wrong.”

But he knew.

In part, he did.

In the first months of Josey’s pregnancy, Jackson was strong. Even when she went in and out of good health — made worser by her morning sickness — Jackson was still eager to love his wife.

Jackson found her more than once naked and standing on that mound squawking like a hawk, or just plain lost. He got good at not staying too far from her. He liked how much she needed him. The same way she had needed Charles. “You can count on me,” he’d tell her. “You don’t need to do nothing. Just sit here and rest your feet.”

By the third month, he was doing more than his fair share of work, the hunting and skinning, the cooking and some cleaning, while able-bodied Sissy did nothing but moan about not having her windows.

By the fifth month, Jackson spent all his time praying for Josey. Twice a day, every day, for healing. That started after he’d snuck up on her in the kitchen, went to hug her, and felt the wet red lines she’d sliced across her forearms. It broke his heart that his love stopped helping her, stopped being the healing kind.

He prayed straight through a week. If his lips weren’t moving to talk, they were moving to say, “Thank you, God, and amen.” Then one day, he stopped.

It was the day he found Josey sprawled out at the edge of the woods, not moving. He didn’t even check to see if she was dead. He just stood there in place, staring at her.

Then he collapsed.

From the ground he cried an ugly cry. Full-bodied, up in the shoulders, cry.

And it made me sorry. Sorry for Josey. Sorry for him. Sorry when I knew he couldn’t care for her. Sorry for his broke heart when he knew it, too. He was ashamed of hisself for wanting to give up. Then devastated by his own fleeting thought: that if Josey were dead, it would be a relief.

I wish Charles were here.

She’ll always have me, but right now she need a Charles.

Charles had spent almost five months living between Sissy’s house and his old slaves’ quarters. In secret, he’d walk the shortcut that Jackson had partly finished so he could see Josey most days, waiting to overhear her tell Jackson she missed her daddy but that never came.

But mostly, Charles wanted to be sure that Josey was safe and properly cared for. That Jackson could be the man to do it. That he could be trusted. Charles needed to know how Jackson would be when he thought no one was watching. Needed to see the character of the man he called friend. And Charles missed Josey.

For weeks he cried every night. Had decided that lonely was the disease that Josey left him with. Incurable. A leprosy of the soul. And that first day, Josey’s wedding day, he was falling apart inside. When Josey and Jackson would come to visit him on Sundays, it was the only day he’d dressed hisself all week. And when they’d come, the house was full again with her laughter and the deep ocean of joy in her smile, only ebbing when she saw in him something like sadness and asked, “Daddy? Are you all right?”

He didn’t want to be the reason for her to stop smiling.

“I’m going west,” he finally told her. “Join the preacher and his family. If they won’t have me, I could join the fighting against the Lakota Indians. The west is wild. I won’t die a useless old man.”

But Josey couldn’t let him go.

She told him so.

The first time he left, he walked fifteen miles back home because of his second thoughts and her voice is his head. But when he got back and saw again how well Jackson cared for Josey, it hurt him some. He thought maybe Jackson could do it better than he could. And he didn’t want to be a burden. So he left. He held the healing vision of Josey in his mind ahead of him so he wouldn’t turn back.

BY THE SIXTH month, Jackson stopped believing Josey could be better. Her sickness wore on him like thighs on inseams. But maybe it wasn’t just her. Maybe it’s the nature of things. How men cain’t stay at home and do the work of women. How he was stuck at home, instead of the war. Some women are bred to be trapped in a house. Caged animals in their housework who feel free.

Not Jackson.

Not for long.

Not since he heard from Charles about the new war against the Indians out west. So when them “negro representatives” came down our path recruiting new federal troops to help re-occupy Texas, Jackson said, “I will. . but I gotta talk to my wife.”

JOSEY SITS ON the ledge of the bucket with her leg bent up on the seat. Her pink-white toes are stretching long and bulby, double creased at the knuckle as the pain of her labor rises.

It hits her hard and she grips the bucket’s seat with all her toes and fingers, bearing down, chin in chest, grunting and groaning. But not like she’s about to have a baby, though.

Quieter. Lot quieter.

Like she’s straining out some solid block of the bowel in private. Guarded.

All of this quiet is to keep Sissy unaware and asleep in the other room. Josey don’t want this moment spoiled by her.

“You a whore,” Sissy told Josey the day after the wedding. “Brides s’posed to bleed on their wedding night,” she said. “These sheets stayed clean. And if you try’na pass off your cycle blood as something different. . know that new blood don’t smell the same.”

WHEN THE PAIN lets go of Josey again, she leans back and lets her legs gap open, waiting for the next wave to come. She’s calling for Jackson. Not for me. It wouldn’t be me. Why would it ever be? Even now?

“Nobody’s going nowhere,” Sissy told Jackson the day he announced his leaving. “There’s a lot here that needs doing, a baby coming. . you ain’t leaving me. You promised the last war was the last time. What about these windows, Jackson? What about the sowing that needs doing? What about what I need?”

JOSEY SCOOTS BACK on the bucket and undoes the top buttons of her dress, tugging the material away from her neck like it’s too hot even though there’s snow outside.

Her panting hot breaths push smoke through her thin lips, drying the soft skin there to clear flakes.

I hover next to her, pacing back and forth, wish I could go get somebody, wake Sissy. “Jackson,” she whispers.

“WE ALL DESERVE freedom,” Josey told him when he said he wanted to go back to war. “We’ll be all right. It’s your turn.”

“Don’t listen to this fool,” Sissy said. “She’s trying to get rid of you. Probably got somebody waiting down that nice path you cleared for her.”