Bill Cheng - Southern Cross the Dog

ONE MORNING HE SAW HER, Emaline, stumble up the grassless path. The sun was on her shoulders, moving through her hair. Eli had been working at the wall, reinforcing the berm with cement when she stopped and greeted him, her high laugh speckling above the rill of moving water.

You’re a performer, she said to him. That’s what one of the men told me anyways.

Eli let his shovel rest.

Yes, miss, he said. He stood the shovel against the wall and wiped his brow with a kerchief.

I knew it! How come you never told me that before?

Eli shrugged and glanced down the line to where her brother was busying himself with a mule driver and his team. He seemed irate, pushing that small man about and violently unhitching the beasts from the wagon.

Nothing to tell, I suppose, Miss Teague.

Well, what’re you doing out here?

Even performers got to eat, he said.

She thought for a second, then crinkled her nose, laughing.

What do you perform at?

I play the piano, Miss Teague.

She clapped her hands together.

The piano! Can you teach me to play?

Eli smirked. I can teach you to shovel.

She laughed again, touching the back of her wrist to her mouth.

You’re too much, Mr. Cutter, she said before she continued down with her morning greetings. She was an attractive girl, he recognized. He watched the other men get mealymouthed around Emaline Teague, hemming and hawing and striking the ground with their heels. She flustered them with her jokes and that was her right, he supposed. But in his gut he could feel the danger there — her brother’s hot eyes on those around her.

There were rumors about Emaline and her brother and the things that went on in that plantation house on the outskirts of town, but near as Eli knew it was only idle talk.

Then one day Emaline stopped coming down to the levee camp with her basket of apples, and it seemed like that foul angry weather would never lift from Homer Teague. He’d come down to the banks, red and mean, his eyes puffy and his cheeks swollen, looking for any chance to take his meanness out of some nigger’s hide.

He’d work his strop hard, taking whole teams sometimes out under the shady oaks. Each of them would off with their trousers and wrap their arms around a tree trunk. Real hard now, he’d hiss. Like hugging your sorry sag-ass mamas, and Teague would snap the whip in the air, rubbing his wrists and elbows. Real tight now.

The men would close their eyes and feel the breeze move over their naked parts. The lash came down hot and sudden. They’d jerk against the pain, digging their bodies into the bark. Those who cried out, Teague would whup harder, lashing his shoulder down, and when the D.C. boys checked in on the camp’s progress, they’d nod to each other. They’d picked the right man for the job.

THERE’D BEEN RAIN THAT SATURDAY night and the men came in, shaking off their clothes and hair, cramming into the makeshift barrelhouse. The whiskey stores were running low and their mood with it. Eli took the bench and began to play. He hadn’t had anything in mind particularly, just noodling to pass the time. He played something slow and blue and wearied and the men slouched down in their seats. They looked up at the ceiling, at one another, at the long lashes of smoke that ghosted the air. No one stood. No one danced. Eli shut his eyes, listened to the rain. The world was filling up.

When he opened his eyes again, he was surprised to see Emaline there in their barrelhouse, the one white face in a sea of black ones. The others watched her in shock as she moved through the drifting smoke and took a seat near the piano.

What was that you were just playing?

Oh — nothing, Eli managed to say. Just a blues.

A blues?

He could feel the others watching them. Hear their low voices.

Your brother know you out here with us?

Don’t talk to me about Homer. Not now.

Well, all right, he said.

It’s pretty, she said. Whatever it is.

Thank you, Miss Teague.

She touched his hand and he took it away.

I need to see you, she said.

She rose and he followed her out, well aware of how it would look. They passed out into the rain and ran across to shelter underneath the equipment shed.

They tell me that you can do things, she said. With powders and such.

Eli was silent for a moment. Something was happening. What it was exactly, he could not say. There was something. A change in the air. A hardening in his gut. Yes, he said after a while.

I need help. Her voice was weak and small.

It was dark around them and he could not see her face.

I don’t lay tricks for your kind. White folks, I mean. It’s not something that’s done, Miss Teague.

They were silent for what felt like a long time. Eli could feel the liquor working through him, the warm ache inside his skull. She was crying, he realized. He let himself put his hand across her back.

What’s wrong? he asked.

Oh, Eli, she cried. I don’t know how to begin to tell you. The pain is unbearable, you must understand. I’ve not been able to eat or sleep in weeks.

She seized his hand and laid it across her stomach. There’s this pain in me, spreading like a fire.

Eli looked at her and swallowed hard.

You been to see the doctor?

He can’t help me, she said.

Eli nodded. Okay, he said. Come back here tomorrow night. I’ll have something for you.

That night he hunted through his pouches for birthwort and pennyroyal. By candlelight, he ground them down with the edge of a lucky nickel and knit up the powder in a worsted sachet. He cut a slice of cohosh root and blessed it twice with St. Jude oil. He tucked it under his tongue, let the bitterness seep into his jaw.

There was a devil in everything. In the good and the bad, in the water rising into his mouth. In every outstretched finger of his hands. In the secret inside her belly. Eli turned to his shaving mirror. The hardening in his gut had not gone away and he felt anxious. For what, he could not say. He looked at his reflection, as if for the last time. He asked for protection. For Emaline. For himself. Would it work? Had it ever? He blew out the candle. He was not sure.

The next night, she was where he’d told her to be. The moon hung above the river, blighted and bad and full. A sightless eye. And beneath he could see its twin, smeared and milky on the water’s surface.

He handed her the sachet in a yellow kerchief.

Brew it up, he told her. And when the water gets a kind of clear yellow, drink it down. Every drop.

She tucked the bundle into her pocket and started to go.

He took her arm.

I never done this before, he said. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

She squeezed his hand and went on.

FOR WEEKS, HE’D CRANE HIS neck out into the lane and look for the red checkcloth homespun and the basket of apples. But Emaline was nowhere to be found. Eli just kept on at his work and on payday, he’d beat the pine-top box, beat the sound from its cables, throw back his head and roar out for the world. He’d roll and sway and feel his troubles lift and lift until, like air, they weren’t hardly nothing at all. Nothing like the furious sound beneath his fingers.

It’d been a wild payday. A few whores had come down into the camps that night, perfumed and big thighed. They fit easy into the crook of men’s arms, across their laps. The camp had gone through three barrels of whiskey that night, and there was some talk about a fourth, but everybody was already walking lopsided, with their words wet and running together. Eli stooped over the piano and the men would scoop their girls around the floor, testing their warm hands on those warmer bodies, the coins jangling in their pockets.