One More River (26 page)

It was hard traveling. There was so much debris in the river, below and above the surface, the ship went slowly. There were times Bernard thought they’d make more progress if they disembarked and walked. The other passengers were restless and argued with the captain and with one another. They argued about how to judge where they were with all the changes in the river’s course wrought by the flood. They fought over food. They fought over where they slept. If the sky took on a darkness in the daytime, they argued about whether it would rain again and for how long. The captain took to wearing a handgun in a holster under his arm and shot off rounds into the air to quell their noise and agitation, just as Bernard the handsome had done. Bernard, Aurora Mae, and Bald Horace kept to themselves, their own firearms hidden in their clothes.

They came upon a fragment of a levee holding twenty Negro souls. Whatever shore the levee once graced, it now stood in the middle of the river, like a tiny island sprouting human beings instead of trees. When they saw the ship coming toward them, they raised their hands and praised Jesus and waved back and forth, hoping for rescue.

My Lord, Bernard said to Aurora Mae. Can it be these poor people have been stranded here these last weeks?

She shuddered and turned to him with teary eyes.

Looks like. Looks like. And there’s babies there. Scrawny, little, faint-lookin’ babies. Sweet Jesus, they look half-dead.

The captain steered the ship away from them, making as wide an arc around as he could maneuver. Bernard and Bald Horace with Aurora Mae a great hulking shadow behind went up to the wheelhouse to confront him.

What are you doing? Why don’t you help those people?

The captain grunted. I told you. No niggers. Besides it don’t look to me like they got the fare.

I’ll pay for them. Double.

The captain looked out his window to where the people stranded on the levee continued to wave, hop up and down, bang together whatever was at hand hopeful they still had a chance to win the attention of the steamship. With a wry smile, he lifted a finger and counted them, calculating. Dang that’s a lotta juice, he said. But I ain’t haulin’ ’em. And I wouldn’t be lettin’ anybody know you got that kind of money on you, boy.

He laughed. It had a coarse, bitter sound. He took one hand off the ship’s wheel then pushed the brake lever. He turned to face them and put the other hand on the grip of his gun.

I wouldn’t be lettin’ me know that.

His hand moved to pull the gun from its holster. A shot whizzed by so close to Bernard’s ear, it burned his skin and singed his hair. The captain’s face blossomed in a jagged red pulp. He twitched, gurgled, crumbled, and was still.

The wheelhouse, thick with gunsmoke, went quiet ’til the air gradually cleared like fog on a day that warms slowly. Bald Horace spoke first. Now we both murderers, he said.

Bernard stepped back to avoid a widening pool of blood at his feet.

Why, oh why, did you do that?

Bald Horace’s eyes went round as two moons. Lordy, don’t you know? First off, he won’t let those poor sufferin’ people on board. And second, he was gettin’ ready to shoot you dead, Bernard. Maybe you didn’t notice.

Oh Horace. We don’t know that. Maybe he was just fixin’ to rob me. I would’ve given him everything I got. He never would have thought you two had gold. We’d still have plenty between us. Oh, this is terrible, terrible. What are we goin’ to do?

Now Bald Horace was crying. Aurora Mae put her arms around him and glared over his head at Bernard. You know how fragile he’s been since the flood! her look said with electric clarity.

Bernard’s own eyes welled up. He paced from one end of the wheelhouse to the other, slapping his head with two hands repeating over and over, Oh, what a mess, a mess, a mess, we’re in a royal mess.

Outside the hand of God was at work. As soon as the steamship braked and came to a grinding halt, the strongest men stranded on the levee jumped off and swam over, risking life and limb to submerged perils none could see. As they climbed over the side, the passengers on deck swarmed near and came this close to running them back off the ship into teeming, brackish water littered with debris. But these men were not the submissive, shuffling Joes they might have pretended to be before the flood. They stood desperate, hunched over, feet planted wide, arms curled, hands out, ready to attack. Their eyes were on fire, their wet clothes plastered against bodies made hard and lean by lifetimes of work and weeks of disaster. They looked like the nightmare savages the white people on board had feared rising up against them since childhood. None dared confront them. Directly, the Negroes took the lifeboats, lowered them down into the river and went to fetch their half-starved women and babies. When these were all transported back to the ship, they went about demanding food and fresh water from the others who scurried about, trying to appear charitable instead of terrified. Night fell.

Under cover of chaos and a starless night, Bernard, Bald Horace, and Aurora Mae wrapped the captain’s corpse in tarpaulin with the ship’s heavy brass compass for company and lowered him overboard with a gentle, sinking plop. They took possession of one of the lifeboats and paddled the great distance to shore, dodging obstacles in the dark. Once ashore, they ran off into the woods.

They continued north. The siblings’ plan was to go back to the old house to see if it stood and if the cousins were still there. Maybe they believed if they went back to their old life, they could put all the horror behind them, forget about it, like it never happened at all. Bernard disagreed. He wanted to go someplace new, out west maybe or Europe, someplace a trio as odd as they were might find their place, renew their spirits, and redeem their sins. They had enough money to go anywhere. It felt as if they had all the money in the world. But the others insisted on returning home. Bernard went along. For now, it was enough to be near her, to sleep on the ground with Bald Horace on one side and his beloved on the other. The great warm mass of her while she slept enthralled him. He loved the way she smelled, the way she moved, the big throaty music of her snores. When she woke up, it was like a whole new planet arose with the sun. Once, when they came upon a freshwater lake and they all took baths, he hid behind a rock above the spot she chose to wash herself in private. He noted the changes in her body since that first time he’d spied upon her. He marveled at its undulations, the way the trails of soap disappeared inside one fold of her flesh and rolled out another. Though there were acres more of it, her skin was still resplendent, iridescent, and her hair, no longer unkempt as she’d left it during her servitude to the master of Ghost Tree, remained a living wonder. His desire knew no diminution. He was as much in love with her as ever, while she, though grateful and tender, kept as much distance from him as she could during a long trek in the backwoods with only her suitor, Bald Horace, and wild beasts for company.

It was high summer by the time they made it back to the family farm. The house and the lands around it had been spared the flood, but the house was nearly as much a wreck as they were. There were cousins still living on the property, but not so many as before. It was like the soul got ripped from here once you all was gone, one of them told Bald Horace. People left. Even before the rains.

Little by little, they built the place back up. Afraid to attract too much attention, they spent their gold sparingly and hoarded the rest. The only extravagant thing they bought was a truck, and they took care to buy one secondhand. Everything should have been fine. Bernard was content to worship his goddess without satisfaction. Bald Horace tried to put his life back together, gathering a little herd of goats and a coop full of chickens. He had his times of torment, dark and flammable as the creosote they scraped from the old chimney. The blown-up face of that captain would come to him in the night, waking him from sleep, and he’d pace the kitchen floor, pounding his fist into his palm, mumbling, Kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you again, I’ll kill you a thousand times, you bastard, one for each time you raped my sister, you bastard, I’ll kill you, proving that he’d got everything mixed up in his sleep or in his conscience. In the morning, Aurora Mae would find him asleep sitting up at the kitchen table, and he’d wake smiling and remember none of it. She fretted over him some, but Bernard told her not to worry, it was alright, it was the way his mind needed to heal. They needed to give him time.

Aurora Mae was miserable. Country life irritated her nowadays. She couldn’t figure out whatever made her want to come back in the first place. Everywhere she looked, there was something she’d struggled to forget. It didn’t matter that the men plastered up the wall where Maxie’s brains had splattered or that they put down a new floor where her own blood had spilled. It didn’t matter that they put up headstones over the graves of her old yard dogs and bought her new ones, more docile creatures given to staying close by the house and barking up a storm if a stranger came by. The only thing that made her halfway happy was concocting her powders and potions in a room they added to the house with its own lighting and plumbing so she could work alone and undisturbed. All that did was give her solitude enough to come to a few conclusions and make a new plan. When she built up a stockpile of wares large enough, she called the men to her.

I am leaving here, she said. I’m loadin’ up the truck with my herbals and whatnot and goin’ back to Memphis. I’m goin’ to Orange Mound, where the black people live, and open up a store there. And I need to do it alone. Don’t ask me why. It suits me, is all, it suits me. You all can stay on here. I don’t care. I’m goin’ back to Memphis. I’m leavin’ in the mornin’.

Bernard was stunned. He stared up at her dumbstruck. Bald Horace, on the other hand, had something to say.

I think I’d like to move on, too. I don’t know if you all noticed, but there’s some things that happened recently I just can’t get out of my thoughts, awake or asleep. I believe I need to do penance for my sins. So, ’Rora Mae, I want you to take my share of the gold. I don’t believe I should profit by it. Lord knows, the white world owes us both, but it owes you a heap more than it owes me. I think I should sell my flock and my herd and head on to wherever God sends me. Mornin’ does me fine as well.

They embraced.

Bernard snapped himself out of shock and argued with them. He made pleas to their sense of family, to the foolishness of splitting up again when it had required so much grief to bring them back together, to the bonds they shared from the antediluvian past up to that very day. When all of that did no good, he played his ace. How could they leave him when he’d saved their lives?

And I thank you, Aurora Mae said, meaning her gratitude should be sufficient. In any case, it was all she was prepared to give.

I saved yours back, Bald Horace said. And it’s killin’ me.

They were at an impasse. Bernard felt as if a pile of rocks crushed his chest. He’d run out of argument, bribery, and blackmail. He felt a husk of a man, light as milkweed. His heart was too dry to break. When the others went to sleep, he sat alone on his bed and stared into darkness. Just before dawn, he got up and walked flatfooted through the house to Aurora Mae’s bedroom. The door was open. He went through it. He could see her, lying there, naked under a sheet, bathed in moonlight. He sat on the edge of the bed. Quietly, so as not to wake her, Bernard wept. She opened her eyes.

There was no surprise in her expression. It was as if she’d been expecting him. Out of kindness, out of affection, she lifted her arm and put a hand behind his neck, drawing him down beside her to comfort him. He felt like a child next to her. She was that big.

I’m sorry, Bernard. I got to go. I got to be alone.

Words he’d kept inside for years spilled out.

I love you, Aurora Mae.

I know. I know.

He propped himself up on an elbow and tried to kiss her, but she turned her head and his lips landed on her cheek.

I can’t do that, she said softly. Maybe once upon a time I could. I always had feelin’ for you, Bernard. I did. But them crackers ruined me for that.

He cried out and sobbed, the great ragged sobs of a rent and tortured soul. The sound of it roused her brother, who was suddenly at the doorway in his nightshirt, his mouth dropped open at the sight before him.

Help him up, Horace, she said. He’s at least as broke down as us.

The next morning, after Aurora Mae packed up the truck bed and Bald Horace sold his goats and chickens to a cousin, Bernard stood on the porch watching them leave, she in the truck and Bald Horace on foot with two days’ rations and a staff, which he believed was the only way a penitent should travel. After a handful of months, Bernard realized they weren’t changing their minds and coming back. Staying there without them made no sense. The cousins were kind but kept a cautious distance from him now that Woodwitch and her brother were gone, because you never knew with white people. They could be sweet all their lives long and then just like that turn on you. Their reserve dug the pit he was in a little deeper. Bundling his broken heart together with his memories and his gold, he left, too, without plan or purpose.

The first thing he did was find a place to bury half the gold. There was that much of it. He could not carry it all for long. He chose a high place at the outskirts of Saint Louis in a graveyard flanked by a great stone church, thinking it unlikely to be disturbed by flood and impossible to forget. Then he headed west for no particular reason other than to fight the temptation to follow his lost love south. Besides, he’d had enough of the North in Cincinatti. Despite the gold sewn inside his jacket and the false pockets of his pack, he’d been poor too long to know how to be rich. He rode the rails where he could or walked. Boxcars were stuffed with black folk. The first car he hopped, he threw his pack in ahead of him, and the weight of it slamming against the floor created a great cloud of dust. As he hauled his limbs up and in, a multitude of coughing fits welcomed him. He looked up through the settling air to see what appeared to be two dozen Negroes ranging in age from toddlers to ancients.