The Invention of Wings (38 page)

There was a potter’s field nearby. I knew they’d bury him there and nobody would know where he was laid. The edict from the judges said we couldn’t cry, or say his name, or do anything to mark him, but I took a little piece of red thread from my neck pouch and tied it round one of the twigs on a low, dipping branch to mark the spot. Then I cried my tears and said his name.

I
t was long about November when Goodis caught a chest cough and I headed to the stable with some horehound and brown sugar for his throat, thinking it’s another dull-luster day in the world. One more stitch in the cloth.

Up in the house missus and Nina were bickering. One minute it’s the way missus treats us slaves, next it’s Nina refusing to go back to society. Without Sarah here to separate them, they kept a fight going all day. Phoebe was in the kitchen house cooking a stew meat, getting more suggestions from Aunt-Sister than she needed. Minta was hiding out someplace, probably the laundry house, and Sabe, if I had to guess, was in the cellar, smoking master Grimké’s pipe. Now that the liquor was gone, I smelled pipe smoke all the time.

I slowed down by the vegetable garden to see if Goodis planted it for the winter. It was nothing but dirt clods. The ornament garden was in a shamble, too—the rose vines choking the oleander and the myrtle spurting in twenty wrong directions. Missus said Goodis gave shiftless a bad name, but the man wasn’t lazy, he was sick to the back teeth of forcing himself to care about her squashes and flowers.

While I was studying the dirt and worrying about him, I got the feeling somebody was watching me. I looked first at missus’ window, but it was empty. The stable door was open, but Goodis had his back to me, rubbing down the horse. Then, from the edge of my eye, I saw two figures at the back gate. They didn’t move when I looked their way, just stood there in the sharp light—an old slave woman and a slave girl. What’d they want? There was always a slave ready to sell you something, but I’d never seen one come peddling to the back gate. I hated to shoo them off. The old woman was bent and frail-looking. The girl was holding her by the arm.

I walked back there, stepping with my cane, my fingers round the rabbit head, feeling how it was smoothed to the grain from all the years of holding. The woman and the girl didn’t take their eyes off me. Coming closer, I noticed their head scarves were the same washed-out red. The woman had yellow-brown skin. All of a sudden, her eyes flared wide and her chin started to shake. She said,
“Handful.”

I came to a stop, letting the sound flutter through the air and settle over me. Then I dropped the cane and broke into a run, the closest I could get to one. Seeing me come, the old woman sank to the ground. I didn’t have a key for the gate, just flew over it, like crossing the sky. Kneeling down, I scooped her in my arms.

I must’ve been shouting cause Goodis came running, then Minta, Phoebe, Aunt-Sister, and Sabe. I remember them peering over the gate at us. I remember the strange girl saying, “Is you Handful?” And me on the ground, rocking the woman like a newborn.

“Sweet Lord Jesus,” Aunt-Sister said. “It’s Charlotte.”

Goodis carried mauma to the cellar room and laid her on the bed. Everybody crowded in and stared at her like she was a specter. We were deer in the woods, froze to stillness, afraid to move. I felt hot, the breath gone from me. Mauma’s lids rolled back and I saw the white skins of her eyes had started to yellow like the rest of her. She looked thin as thread. Her face had turned to wrinkles and her hair had gone salt-white. She’d disappeared fourteen years ago, but she’d aged thirty.

The girl hunkered next to her on the bed with her eyes darting face to face, her skin dark as char. She was big-boned, big-handed, big-footed with a forehead like the full moon. She looked just like her daddy.
Denmark’s girl.

I told Minta, get a wet rag. While I rubbed mauma’s face, she started to groan and twist her neck. Sabe hauled off running to fetch missus and Nina, and by the time they showed up, mauma’s eyes were starting to open to the right place.

The smell of unwashed bodies hung round the bed, making missus draw back and cover her nose. “Charlotte,
”
she said, standing back a ways. “Is that you? I never thought we would see you again. Where on earth have you been?”

Mauma opened her mouth, trying to speak, but her words scratched in the air without much sense.

“We’re glad you’re back, Charlotte,” Nina said. Mauma blinked at her like she didn’t have the first inkling who was saying it. Nina must’ve been six or seven when mauma disappeared.

“Is she in her right mind?” missus asked.

Aunt-Sister set her hands on her hips. “She’s wore-out. What she need is food and a good long rest.” Then she sent Phoebe for the stew broth.

Missus studied the girl. “Who’s this?”

Course, that’s what everybody wanted to know. The girl drew up straight and gave missus a look that could cut paper.

“She’s my sister,” I said.

The room went silent.

“Your
sister
?” said missus. “As I live and breathe. What am I supposed to do with her? I can barely keep the rest of you fed.”

Nina tugged her mother toward the door. “Charlotte needs rest. Let them see to her.”

When the door closed behind them, mauma looked up at me with her old smile. She had a big ugly hole where her two front teeth used to be. She said, “Handful, look at you. Just look at you. My girl, all grown.”

“I’m thirty-three now, mauma.”

“All that time—” Her eyes watered up, the first tears I’d ever seen her shed in my life. I eased down on the bed beside her and put my face to hers.

She said low against my ear, “What happen to your leg?”

“I took a bad fall,” I whispered.

Sabe sent everybody to their chores while I fed mauma spoonfuls of broth and the girl gulped hers straight from the bowl. They slept side by side through the afternoon. Time to time, Aunt-Sister stuck her head in the door and said, “Yawl all right?” She brought short bread, castor oil boiled in milk, and blankets for a floor pallet that I reckoned would be my bed for the night. She helped me ease off their shoes without waking them, and when she saw their feet festered over with sores, she left soap and a bucket of water by the door.

The girl roused once and asked for the chamber pot. I led her out to the privy and waited, watching the leaves on the oak tree drop, the soft way they floated down.
Mauma’s here.
The wonder of it hadn’t broken through to me yet, the need to go down on my knees. I couldn’t stop feeling the shock of what she looked like, and I was worried what missus might do. She’d looked at them like two bloodsuckers she wanted to thump off her skin.

When the girl came out of the privy barefoot, I said, “We need to wash your feet.”

She looked down at them with her mouth parted and the pink tip of her tongue poking out. She couldn’t be but thirteen.
My sister.

I sat her down on the three-legged stool in the yard in the last warm spot from the sun. I brought the bucket and soap outside and stuck her feet in the water to soak. I said, “How many days did you and mauma walk to get here?”

She had barely spoken since this morning at the gate, and now the backwash of words rushed from her lips and wouldn’t stop. “I ain’t sure. Three weeks. Could be more. We come all the way from Beaufort. Massa Wilcox place. We travel by night. Use the foot paths the traders take and stay to the creeks. In the daytime, we hide in the fields and ditches. This the fifth time we run, so we learn which-a-way to go. Mauma, she rub pepper and onion peel on our shoes and legs to muddle the dogs. She say this time we ain’t going back, we gon die trying.”

“Wait now. You and mauma ran off
four times
before this and got caught every time?”

She nodded and looked off at the clouds. She said, “One time we get to the Combahee River. Another time to the Edisto.”

I lifted her feet from the bucket one at a time and rubbed them with soap while she talked, and that was something she liked to do—talk.

“We carry parched corn and dried yams with us. But that run out, so we eat poke leaves and berries. Whatever we find. When mauma’d get where she can’t go no more, I’d put her on my back and carry her. I’d go a ways, then rest and carry her some more. She say, if something happen to me, keep on till you find Handful.”

The things she told me. How they drank from puddles and licked drops off sassafras leaves, how they climbed trees in the swamp and tied themselves to the limbs and slept, how they wandered lost under the moon and stars. She said one time a
buckruh
came by in a wagon and didn’t see them laying right beside him in a ditch. Came to find out, she spoke Gullah, the language the slaves used on the islands. She’d picked it up natural from the plantation women. If she saw a bird, she’d say, there’s a
bidi.
A turtle was a
cooter.
A white man, a
buckruh.

I dried her feet good in my lap. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

“The man who work us in the rice field call me Jenny. Mauma say that ain’t no name. She say our people use to fly like blackbirds. The day I was born, she look at the sky and that’s what she call me. Sky.”

The girl didn’t look like her name. She was like the trunk of a tree, like a rock in a field you plow round, but I was glad mauma had given it to her. I heard Goodis coughing in the stable and the horse whinny. When I stood, she peered up at me and said, “When we was lost, she tell me the story ’bout the blackbirds, I don’t know how many times.”

I smiled at her. “She used to tell me that story, too.”

My sister wasn’t much to look at, and to hear her talk, you’d think she was too simple to learn, but I felt the toughness of mauma inside her from the start.

I came awake that night on the floor pallet and mauma was standing in the middle of the room with her back to me, not moving, gazing at the high-up window. The darkness was tucked round her, but her kerchief had slipped off and her hair was shining like fresh polish silver. Over on the mattress, Sky was snoring loud and peaceful. Hearing me stir, mauma turned round and spread open her arms to me. Without making a sound, I got up and went to her. I walked right into her arms. That’s when she came home to me.

The next time I woke, early light had settled and mauma was sitting up in bed, looking at her story quilt. She’d been sleeping under it all night and didn’t know it.

I went over and patted her arm. “I sewed it all together.”

The last time she’d seen the quilt, it was a jumble-pile of squares. Some of the color had died out from them, but her story was all there, put together in one piece.

“You got every square in the right place,” she said. “I don’t know how you did that.”

“I went by the order of what happened to you is all.”

When Phoebe and Aunt-Sister brought breakfast, mauma was still hunched over the quilt, studying every stitch. She touched the figure on the last square, the one I knew to be Denmark. It pained me to think I might have to tell her what happened to him.