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** PROLOGUE **
Except passages that observe (a) the history of The Trail of Tears and (b) certain aspects of two actual judicial decisions, The Cotton Country
is autobiographical, faithfully — all facts true, all events actual occurrences (though I have changed the characters' names). I am the character "Joseph."
The Foreword
is the musing of a “narrator” — who, too, is I, the story’s author, Leonard R. Jaffee. The Foreword
is part of the Story. The Epilogue
, too, is the musing of the same “narrator,” again myself, the story’s author.
The Cotton Country is part of a book — “MAP
” — which comprises a set of long short stories that interrelate like parts of a novel but can stand as independent novellas or novelettes. MAP
traces the journeys — geographic & psychosocial journeys — of a character called “Joseph,” the protagonist of the entire book.
Of MAP
’s eight stories, four — “Maine,” “Philly 1 New York,” “Homeward the Ohio,” “Diamond Street” — are published. Maine was a winner of NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’s 1991 national fiction contest; and NEGATIVE CAPABILITY published Maine. Philly 1 New York received two awards (one from NEGATIVE CAPABILITY). Diamond Street was published at Substack, 31 January 2021.
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Foreword
The room held no windows. Joseph dared in.
A current shut the door. He found no light. Only could he feel he had eyes.
Void enveloped him. His lungs revisited the burn of open sea that sucked him in like fright, its python crushing aspiration. The Coast Guard pulled him up, his limbs, mindless, thrashing, like a drunkard's sight, frenzying to fix.
He remembered his child self: flesh like bone; nerves, breath, razors' edges, slicing into fear. His eyelids shuttered his infant life — as if faces of sarcophagi that stored what smiles he begged, provisions gathered for another birth.
His jaw quivered, lurching — as if to square with having spent all speech. His head quaked, his shoulders clamping, and he saw — blind, gaping through coal — the New Year's Eve his car failed dead, surrounded by forest.
Dusk proved midnight since he drove past the last human — or human structure. Snow caked the windshield sighs before he yielded to the truth of his condition. Somewhere forward, over mountains, in his memory, a clay village baited hope — in sand.
He walked straight as he thought the road aimed. A tree surprised his skull.
His instinct learned to budge him only where his fingers cleared. But his hands numbed.
He felled himself, crawled backward to his car. Maybe someone would discover him. Maybe dawn would march him safe before he froze into deep of space.
His senses told the panic of the slave girl he met in an aged court-opinion. The case plowed his attentions, rent his sleep, and he relished the pain, as if relief gained by thumbing an abscess till round hurt covers throb. He would name the girl Noël, for the season of her death, for the news she would bring to him, and for the ring of it.
At home, again, still lawyer, the day he set to put her story to fiction, he offered his journal this note:
She drove my touch into the marrow of her century, through morbidities that beset, alike, the cell tissue of my own times and all civilization before.
Mary, Joseph’s wife, appeared — her hair the full of empty sleep, her skin of butter's tone, its hue the core of pine. She moved in arcs sliding through ovals rounding a gait of cranes gliding an air of gauze swooning in spiraled breeze. "Join me at the river, Joseph?"
Mary's presence threatened his vision of Noël — its integrity. Mary bore up stalwart past her means — as when her long, spare body matched Joseph's setting bear-tall posts in clay, mud, rock, and blizzard, sunup through moon-clear, pitch of December. How would Noël — stunted crude, a brown slave, spent — weigh against Mary, her radiance, her mettle?
Guilt invaded him. His conscience donned a paper hat, stripped to diaper, bounded squealing through denuded streets, arms beckoning with rubber knife and tinsel sword.
That evening, like desert, his journal-note worried him. He reproduced it in his computer (which he ushered past Y2K by fooling it back to the '80s); and he struggled there with the terms. As the story took form, he would amend the note often. Always he would try to salvage its essences. At last, though, as by triumph of siege, revision would reduce the note to "Zen oblivion" (as would Joseph slaughter a grandiloquence that tried to infiltrate his language when he cast the story's end).
But in the moments when he penned the note in his journal, he drew pride from its tint and structure, its diction, rhythm, and imagery — "lordly, yet elegant." Such style removed him from "the crude milieu" of his parents and the "brash, common vacancy" of his childhood's community — "where pop songs defined music and greeting cards concluded art."
Later Joseph learned his "lordly," "elegant" prose had bonded him, by the gum of their reaction, to the experience he craved to deny. He fed his diary "inklings" that grew the insight. The first — penciled, grey — began to change the way the story's characters spoke, then, a little, the way he painted environments and phenomena:
Actions make self. So, word equals idea, consciousness: self is language, utterly. A wolf's howl is longing, though its curve inspires, by mimicry, the sadness of a lip crescented down.
Actions make self only when they behave as words, even if only to the actor. Speech and thought are action, and conscious action is language, that of manifest judgment — even if a wolf's, even to the wolf.
Neither accident nor art explains Joseph's alluding to wolves — or, you may see, the fugue of the "inklings" this Foreword traces from Joseph's diary. The causes churn from weaves of forces resounding in Joseph's unconscious. The same forces impelled him to admire the slave girl, roused him to tell her story, stirred him, in waves of dream, to transfigure law into collages of surreals.
Savages marry their fates to totem creatures. Joseph felt kinship with goat and wolf (and the latter despite he would not kill a bird or beast or eat any of it). Goat and wolf were two incarnations of the same spirit — same grace (of springs leafing), same lust, same mischief that allures, same fight and courage, same power of intelligence, same devil dancing from their eyes...
Oh, goats walk on fingernails and wolves on toes; and wolves rip flesh and barely chew it, but goats grind leaves and grains into mash. Yet such distinctions just curry the anthropocentric taxonomist. They don't tell an animal's soul (as a poem, Joseph's, soon below, will verify). First, though, before I lend you the poem, I'll tender one more "inkling" — so you can feel how the poem winds into the evolution you'll encounter in the trek from first "inkling" through consequence of last.
The second "inkling" (green, of print) opened Joseph's sight of how he imagined; and it endowed his gut a grasp of the anemia of assertions and the strength of words that show, even conceive, our sense. Just so, you may doubt its mostly-philosophic prose befit this foreword of a fiction. Still, its peculiar quality renders insight into Joseph, so his narration, where his forces liken to the story's characters and its conditions and events, psychic and concrete, human and other.
Language does not convey meaning (as if thoughts played cargo of a ship of syntax). Language constitutes meaning (as lust whelps hunger and hunger lusts).
If you say you did not mean what you have written, you had three thoughts, acted three meanings: You wrote one. You thought ("meant") another. You said a third (that you meant not what you wrote).
As "red ball" is not "red plus ball," it is not a conveyance of an idea of a red ball — or of a proposition "red plus ball." The phrase "red ball" means itself, the special idea it is, including what it takes from, and gives, its setting (shape, color, music, milieu), human and else.
Alas, I trouble at my treatment of a fact that surfaced soon before my transcription of Joseph's second "inkling." I mean that goat and wolf possess the same fight and courage. I did not count the chance that you, like common thought, do not hold goats among warriors — as if Pan did not conquer the objects of his lust.
Disney filmed a cougar's drubbing by a Toggenburg that forest rangers tethered by a leg to make him cat-bait. The rangers planned to kill the cougar while he feasted on the goat. The cat attacked; but horns gouged, hooves pummeled, goat-teeth bit, and the cat scrambled off with just his own blood to lick and only terror for meat.
The film recorded a real event. And Joseph witnessed other proof.
Easter neared that year of JFK's assassination. Joseph thought to compose a mass for friends taken to kill or die in Vietnam, or a cantata to mark his beating conscription, eluding the slaughter.
Pushcarts lined both sides of Ninth Street farther than Joseph could see. They offered lettuce, peppers, bluefish, shrimp, mussels, flounder, shad, potatoes, escarole, tomatoes, chicken (living and dead), eggs, bananas, foreign pears, cheap clothes, comic books, junk jewelry, souvenirs......
Joseph loved most the smells of the store beside the alley near Villa di Roma, a restaurant that looked like skid row missions, but owned the town's best South Italian chef (whose food was proved unpoisoned by companies of roaches). Between the store's notion shelves (replete with sundry cooking tools, and boxes, jars, and cans of many colors) and its long, squat fridge (displaying gnocchi, gorgonzola, asiago, provolone...), Joseph studied, with eye and nose, the contents of eleven whiskey-barrels full of seven species of olives steeping in marinades and brines.
He counted his bills and change — other than the wad of singles he set aside for his weekly fifth of cognac, which he sipped while atomizing poems or fiction or writing music. "Quarter pound of asiago. Two pounds linguini. Kalamatas, half a pint. Pint of French green — the garlic-cumin broth. Two pints Sicilian. A liter of tomatoes — plum, San Marzano. A pound of garlic, large, the red."
The door clicked behind him, and he crossed Ninth and strolled to Carpenter. Just around the corner, in a picture window, thirty goats — kids, bucks, does, mothers — hung, murdered, in rows long as Cadillacs. Steel hooks gored their skulls. Joseph dizzied and puked. Then his blood commanded him.
A bell clanged and the door squealed open; it shut on its own. Sand and cedar shavings crunched beneath his boots. Brick-sized tiles made the sallow light seem ivory.
"I want a goat." Joseph smelled his olives and cheese to keep from puking more, or fainting. "Sure kid. Whatihya wanna spend?" The butcher snorted. "I have this, sir." Joseph handed the butcher his wad of cognac money. "Well, this'll getyuh..." The butcher's finger (stumped, burley) pointed to a corpse. "No. I want a live one, Sir." Joseph squinted (lest he weep). "Whatihya gonna do widh... Well...that's your business." The butcher whisked his hand as if swatting a gnat.
They entered a huge room behind the freezer. Billies, kids, and does huddled in cages and awaited a death they’d witnessed in the slaughter of others of their tribe. Behind the farthest bars, in a corner, an infant snugged his head among the swollen breasts of his mother's belly. He uttered little bleats. Joseph wailed and convulsed with weeping. "I want that one." His words jumbled their sounds.
"Whatsah mattah, kid. Yuh change yuh mind? Can't-chuh kill it? Yuh want I should?" The butcher shook his head for disgust. "No! I want it to live. ...... Do I have enough money, sir?" Joseph stiffened to muzzle his rage. "Here. Yuh get change." The butcher slapped a dollar in Joseph's hand, snorted, sheathed his knife, spit his toothpick, and shrugged.
The mother tried to fight the abduction; but her ordeal had withered her energy. Joseph hugged her and asked the butcher to remove her child. She screamed, and against her pain and his certainty that she and all others left would satisfy the slaughterer, he could set just one, spare virtue: her baby's escape into love. He decried his poverty to those he'd abandon there, for whom he could not purchase freedom. He imagined the butcher gutted and dangling from a hook skewering his neck.
Joseph's arms cradled the infant; and he carried him on foot, a mile and more, to his couple rooms of a central Philadelphia tenement. He named the infant Hennessy, for the cognac money that saved him.
Seven days merged into none, and Hennessy reached his third week of life. Joseph house-trained Hennessy in time to celebrate his first month's survival — the virtue of Irish oats and the goat milk Joseph bought from the Amish at Reading Terminal Market.
Each day, the two strolled downtown streets together. Hennessy heeled without leash. He waited with Joseph at intersections, till red lights yielded to green. He looked up at Joseph often.
Summer passed, and Hennessy's hair reached half to the ground. Two horns sprouted; and he played "buck" with Joseph, who set his outside fingers to the outsides of the horns and pushed while Hennessy cocked his head, bowed, reared up 65 degrees, and kicked his hinds back skyward.
Joseph had a low-set dining table. He sat on sofa cushions. Next to his plate, he put a bowl of raw grain. Hennessy ate with Joseph.
One September afternoon, under August sun, Hennessy and Joseph walked to Rittenhouse Square. An old woman stopped them on Spruce Street, at the olive-walled luncheonette defiling a corner a block from the Musical Academy where Joseph had studied composition and a spare college curriculum. "My! What an unusual dog. What kind is it?"
Soon they could see the still-verdant trees through the gap parting the two rich hotels oppressing the head of Nineteenth Street. Joseph could smell October advancing from distant North. He saw the leaves bloom red and orange in a dream of somnambulism. Just inside the edge of the Square, Jane settled in a green wood bench, her two Doberman Pinschers lying below.
Joseph greeted Jane and introduced Hennessy. One Doberman rose, put his paws to Joseph's shoulders, and licked his face.
Was he jealous? Did he fear for Joseph? You could barely see Hennessy for his speed: horns gouging; front hooves pounding; teeth goring; jaw crushing; body rearing, swirling; hinds, like hammers, slamming; shrill bleats piercing; and dog-blood marring Jane's skirt.
The Pinschers yelped and squealed and darted across the pebbled cement toward the fountain pool enveloped by the grey balustrade. Hennessy chased them some, then returned to Joseph, stood solid by his side, nibbled at his knee.
But this digression (is it that?) begs reminder of our instant aim: Joseph's poem — the poem of subliminal forces that brought his "inklings" wolves that admire the slave girl who lived The Cotton Country.
The poem shows Joseph wedded, in passion, to polyphony like Josquin's and Ockeghem's and Bach's and Webern's of the year of his death — a polyphony of moving shapes transmuting in airs of sound. That passion evolved the "inklings" this Foreword tells.
The poem's spark ignited from a moment of Joseph's transformation of law. And it illustrates the metamorphosis.
Joseph read a case of a claim that a fenced wolf bit a infant boy. [
footnote 1]
The court ignored evidence, corrupted rules of proof. Joseph spat on the pages, tore them utterly, created them the rubbish they pretended not to be — except first he copied a sentence of an expert's testimony (which he changed by making its conjunction "or"), and he reduced the case to that language:
A wolf's wail is a sign of compassion or an effort to get attention.
Joseph heard the meanings grow in canon-song. The song bore his poem — a fugue, plagal like Islamic rugs, designed imperfection:
1. Yin She made her lap to hover unicorns — in dream that eats all flesh, of air that blinds the eye of light that swims in night, that broods the ice of wolves who lather ready in your veins and nuzzle, smooth, their quick teeth white within your howling throat. 2. Yin of Yang, Yang of Yin Night swims in her. Eyelight blinds her. Every eating flesh has dreamt her. The unicorn was made to nuzzle in her lap. His veins quicken the wolves that hover her ready. His lathered throat howls white against the iceteeth of her air. 3. Yin become Yang, Yang born from Yin She broods your white air ice, and makes its lightning flesh — the blind wolf's howl that hovers quickened in your eyes, that swims the lathered veins of unicorns, that fathers the devouring dream whose lapping nuzzle smooths night's teeth around your ready throat.
She held a parasol, ornate with embroidery, baubles dangling from the frail arcs of its edge. It tilted back behind her head, its staff resting on her shoulder. The embroidery showed a tale of Languedoc, of Charlemagne's siege of fortress Carcassonne and the town's long, victorious defiance. As her hand neared his face, she lifted the story above him and twirled it, slowly, many times, the miniature scenes revolving like pictographs of prayer wheels.
Oh, that last paragraph — its place if not its imagery — must have disoriented you, as it did me. It forced its entry here, surprised me, like eruption, from deep of other place, other century, from deep within the story of the Cotton Country. But perhaps its intrusion is serendipity. Perhaps it augurs connections of the psychic tissue Joseph sacrificed to his poem and unconscious imperatives that formed Joseph's casting of the story.
Maybe Joseph's poem begged it: Legend holds that Carcassonne's inhabitants, and the Franks, behaved as unicorns and wolves. A woman saved the town by slaughtering a pig and hurling it beyond the wall, to Charlemagne — when the Franks’ siege ought have drained the town's stores past endurance.
Except its lack of names, the paragraph belongs inside the slave girl's story, near its door. But I can't remove it there; for only gods reverse time or crab its content. Yet, I can take measure to prevent another invasion — though, perhaps, the invader has not meddled, but carried us, on light, to the story's fate. Whatever that truth, we must further, now, the course of Joseph's "inklings."
From the third "inkling" (of black, indelible), Joseph collected the ingredients of awe — for solution. The tincture cleared his taste, as through remote infection — a humbling the story witnesses, like falling in sleep, by wisps and inchings: an innocence of beat, sprays of bewilderment, a winnowing of adjectives (and visions of shaving his head), and patience flowing. We profit if we bathe the miracle of how such chemistry arose from the touch of this passage:
Language constitutes the meaning that is self, conscious being. Self embodies programs of thought, feeling, emotion — spawn of comparative analysis, however quick, secret, precerebral, sublime.
Contempt is not beast, but judgment. Judgment aggregates and orders terms to build import — as if "lazy" + "thieving" + "squalid" + "cruel" = "contemnible" (a synergy). Emotion is the outcome of a neural algebra obeying axioms of psychic mold.
The fourth "inkling" altered Joseph's vision as it did the story's characters — not just their language, but the quantums of their incognizant lives. It moved Joseph to let unconscious happenings make the story, as spin and several gravities make tides. At first, though, he found himself trying to squeeze events from dreams, and he struggled to kill the hubris of those efforts. Notice, apropos, that the third "inkling" grouped words by adding them arithmetically to make synergy, yet the second insisted a phrase can't equal a sum of its terms.
In the brown slosh, his flailing brewed a moment of the shape of angel pressed against snow. Pigs and elephants refresh themselves in mire.
I have breached my promise. Those last lines (brown slosh...elephants...) intruded from the story's end. And they stole one paragraph from two — concocted connection against the structure Joseph expressed. Still, can you see the links grasping amidst those errant lines, their mire and snow, their creatures, their color and flailing, their cuts of phrase, the evolving tapestry of Joseph's poem, and Joseph's shift from (α) the rule that wholes are not sums to (σ) a scent that addition glues synergy from assemblings of exclusives (as math beds in emotion premised on feel)?
After he stopped (cold stopped) his editing of The Cotton Country, Joseph sent me a note that may fit:
Often we say words we "don't mean," blurt sentences we "don't intend," of plural significance we can't explain but surprises us. We blame neglect, fear, drunkenness, anger, even "hearing voices" — maybe wizard codes of microwaves — that force words or phrases irresponsible, or conjure acts, like "devil"-slayings, that play the messages of gods.
But do words clasp your throat, wring themselves from you? In our minds, we hear unflagging songs we can't endure, hold relentless conversations with our thoughts, suffer insights, free associations. Volition fleshes like bone, cached in a sarcophagus.
You may believe — as if beyond question, as if truth exists — that you contrive the plans you would utter. But always something not your art — some beast, its motive, unconscious, or nothing — sets and governs the course of thought, your language. Do the words control themselves — as contracts, those emperors, cause what they will?
You insist: "I can attribute some thought to events outside me — my reaction." But why, truly why, do you react as your words do, if you do?
What beneath, subliminal, compels our terms? Do they seethe from the well of making dreams? Do they invade? Just happen?
A current draws me. The room shuts the door, closes me from light, opens to void. Only could I feel I wore eyes. The sight envelopes, like burning sea — fear, cold, its python, crushing inspiration. Memory returns to child, frail, infant, another birth-not-done.
But here is the fourth of Joseph's "inklings" (royal blue):
[Often blue wrapped everything. Azure wove itself around the sense of Mary’s sleep. In the tints and placids of lagoons sapphired by a sky of open and June, one could see the chrysalis that bore, and protects, the narrator’s vision. Joseph’s coming times eddy, all and always, in the deeps of turquoise flashing from the phosphorus of algae spangling coves of Oregon’s sea.]
All conscious sense is language. It occurs just as symbol, even if not of any lexicon.
You recall — in image and feeling — a garden party. You chose, subliminally, to recall one part — the smell of a rose a woman wore, perfume to which you attribute significance, by your choice of that memory. You devise the reminiscence symbol.
You remember another scent you loved in your childhood. Even do you feel you smell it, now, as if actual. Why? Subconsciously you chose it among all odors of your past. You pursue its meaning, what it stands for, what it says — its bell that made Pavlov drool.
Joseph came to that sight instantly before the fifth and final "inkling" (of script, deep violet). Both appeared just hours before he whittled out his last journal-note, which the Epilogue reports.
I leave to you, finally, the import of the timing, though I risk this surmise: His last journal-note relates to his "inklings" as a school reunion lures the wonder of a misanthrope who wishes he could yearn to go home — the way a man forbears to banish his woman of cheating and ice, his love still inventing her the true, warm creature of his passion.
The fifth "inkling" was this:
Like a mirror, one can stand responsible only for all one's symbols, even if not called words. The symbols make one's responsibility — as farming punishes with drought, as we do not reckon reflex or instinct's issue.
A moron madman kills your mate. We do not arrest him. He could not call his action "wrong." It made no meaning, to him, in him — as a lamb's flesh signifies nothing, even in a wolf's belly.
But, beneath, does instinct, or reflex, explain all acts — every deed, thought, perception, word. Is responsibility illusion? Does integrity equal the eye of a goat? Do we sing just songs of ravens and crows, talk only grunts? Is the maker immune for every sense such music means — even as heard?
You must judge, yourself, from the story, this message's effects — the rendered, and rendering. This Foreword can offer only Joseph's first, spoken apprehension, which he seemed to feel (wine notwithstanding) almost as others suffer wonder at the sure loss of religion, even hope of faith:
You bereave your grandeur. You confront, naked, alone, the only truths — rude nature, blind chance.
You dread to ask: Do we know honor, or beauty, or art, even conscience, compassion — or love? Are they frauds of hunger and lust, their satisfaction, or its lack?
My dog bit my hand for the pain of his meningitis. In an instant, his soul climbed his torture to remorse, and his teeth retreated. I could not keep from weeping for him. He tried to lick my tears, but could not lift himself.
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The Story
Randy wondered: Why didn't the Army make his half-breed mother join Grandma on the Trail of Tears — the Cherokees' banishment to Oklahoma? Through all his working to get President Jackson's acts reversed (in the White House, the Senate, the press, the courts), he never distinguished his mother's case. She was Grandma's daughter, grandchild of a Chief.
He remembered the dresses Grandma wore — different each day — and the way she groomed her hair, back tight, a long braid coiled up, snakelike, a hand's breadth above her neck. Before he started school, she would sit him on her lap, and he'd rest his head on her breast, and she would hold a book out and read to him. He would look up and make his vision trace the contours of her face, which her hair submitted, full, to search.
Sometimes he stared at the words, pointed to one, questioned the frayed ribbons of black marks, what they commanded she say. "This shape's an A, Randy, and this an I, and that a D. When they fit together this way they tell you to make the sound of... And the sound means..."
When he started school he could write, and read what he'd written. Grandma took him every day, helped with all the students. But Randy never learned the alphabet of Cherokee.
The school had three teachers — one of Irish and Cherokee descent, another Grandma's niece, the third a son of Grandma's sister and a Scot. Not a few students bore some European blood. All were children of soldiers, merchants, craftsmen, farmers, an apothecary, a journalist......
In the dawn of the Trail of Tears, Grandma stood facing him, her hand extended as if to drink his torment. She wore a purple dress of silk gathered like Roman shades, horizontally in vertical bands. On its curves and planes tumbling on curves and planes, their infinities of shape and direction, the sun's light transmogrified its purple into reds and blues and violets, a barrage of pastels and muted whites. Ivory lace embellished the top of its bodice, from the royal silk's plunge into the cleavage of her breast to the gold cotton collar banding half her neck.
"Remember, Randy? You were learning Latin. Even then you wanted to be a lawyer. When the Creeks massacred all at Fort Mims, we Cherokees helped Jackson rout the Creeks. Remember? Pride swelled you.
Now
, barrister, how do you feel about your White nation, your father's race?"
"Shame, Gramma. An' rage. Rage Ah cayn't put anywayuh."
Grandma held a parasol ornate with embroidery, baubles dangling from the frail arcs of its edge. It tilted back behind her head, its staff resting on her shoulder. The embroidery told a story of Languedoc, of Charlemagne's siege of the fortress Carcassonne and its long, victorious defiance. As her hand neared Randy's face, she lifted the story above him and twirled it, slowly, many times, the miniature scenes revolving like pictographs of prayer wheels.
His hands battled his tears. His cheeks paled despite the sear of brine that wiped them. In his eyes, the darks hardened, berries strayed among brambles red on crusted snows. He couldn't fit his rage to the flesh of avarice that ripped his mother's mother from her family and home, that consigned her people to the meek crevice of a foreign waste, "a land of barbarians, a feral place, devoid of memory and shelter."
As if dizzying in fever, he stumbled helping Grandma mount her surrey. It was stationed near the rear. Ahead, behind, around, her people wept. Some beseeched the Great Spirit, some the god whom Jackson avowed. But nothing arrested the rising throes of shock and disbelief. They were "reeling toward hell."
Grandma said that long before the Spaniards came, her people built fortress towns, lived in fixed houses, mined copper, wove fabric, grew corn...... "Before you rode your first horse, we built cities and government like Whites'." Some summers, when school was shut, Randy worked errands for the Cherokee newspaper — a two-language text, Cherokee and English. "Remember Randy? People read it around the States, and even in England and France. Still, Jackson — President Jackson — calls us savages, took our property, gave it to Whites......"
Randy studied his clay-mired shoes — ocher on pitch, dark neath moon, clear of midnight, winter opened on Bantu's face...... He shook his head to save his conscious from reverie, its cavern that swallows mind away from care.
The last near clouds retreated. The sun blared as if from Saharas of his fantasy.
There, beside the wagon just before, a tribesman slammed his army musket on a boulder, broke its stock, threw its pieces in the brush. He tore his sergeant's tunic from his body, slashed his breast with his bayonet, stabbed the blade into the earth at the road's shoulder, striped his blood across his cheeks. Tears streaked the scarlet emblems, then fell to the confusion of ruts the many carriages and wagons dug through ragged tracks of boot and hoof prints.
Randy pondered his mettle. He'd fathered two daughters and a son since he started lawyering, won every case he tried. But he failed to stop the Cherokee's exile, which his final protest called "a grotesque repudiation of the high culture of civilized people who dealt gently with the society that now would herd them into deserts of savages and hard unknowns, a cruel dishonor of a gracious people who greeted England's emigrants with friendship and supported their colonies and this nation with their bodies and lives."
He tried to tell Grandma he'd go with her. His words stuttered and broke like falling rocks. Sobs convulsed his breath. She exacted his promise he'd "stay put East" — "make more of" himself.
"Look, Randy. I kept a journal." She'd bound it with thick leather — burnt sienna, adorned with gold. "See? Here! My annals of your school years, till you earned a law diploma, and here, I pasted it, the notice of your entry to the bar. I want to fill more pages, Randy......"
She dropped the book, grabbed his shoulders, shook him. "Your wife's come from France. Your children have little of my blood — and know less of my culture."
Like a snared rabbit, Randy's thought snapped — snapped into the celebrated case he won against Charlie Slade. Nausea ravaged him. Spasms raided gullet from gut.
He lifted his eyes to survey the panorama: Cherokees on horses and wagons covering the valley floor, White cavalry-soldiers darting here and there, pointing, shouting orders, like sheep-dogs biting at their charge's hocks to press them tight and harry them out the master's course.
"Did God beghit this loss tuh balance mah great vict'ry — tuh repay thuh indiff'rence Ah paid in tribute tih th' social awduh Jackson personified, thuh culture Ah, Randih, courted fuh favuhs drippin' like tallow-wax?"
* * *
"Hel-loh Randih. Damned hot, fuh week aftuh New Yeeuhz.
We shawr do have owselves a rahgiht interest'n' case heeah. Ain't we, Randih? Ah've been lookin' fohwuhd tih tryin' it 'gainst yawl. Ah truly hope thuh bettuh gent weeins. Been stud'yin' up hahrd on mah pleadin's. ...
Oh! Yawl heard thuh news, Ah 'xpect. 'Bout Andih Jacks'n."
"Can't say Ah have, Chahlih. Been stuck 'n thuh bowels of a law lahib'ry past few days."
"Well Andih done got him-self ee-lected Pres'dent."
"That's bad, Chahlih. All thuh wahight trash gonna ghit real upp'ty — make all sawts uh dumb claims uh rahights an' make a damn mess uh things."
"Now don't yawl fret none, Randih. Ain't nothin' gonnuh change — 'xcept fuh ou' ben'fit."
"Hey Chahlih. Ah heard this judge made uh will that frees all his nigguhs an' gives each one uh hundred dahlluhs. Gonnuh be rahight fun tryin' this case buhfaw heeim."
══════════════
When Joseph closed that dialogue, an apprehension riddled him, like acid percolating. He adored cinema, but mostly fierce tragedy, film noir — and costume dramas, dour, of foreign times.
Affliction calmed him — the way dark rain resolves longing, like the flattening protests of soap — as might a friend. He couldn't manage comedy (though he spoofed out polished wit, swift, lithe, a dolphin jockeying ragged seas). Even from himself, he secreted his envy of artists who planted sadness with slap-stick or quips or humor that played its damage as blithe accident, with compassion like a ninja's, which appears as lack.
Did he despair? He told his journal this:
I will deal the story's pathos with impassivity that renders alkali from ordinary occupation. I will bleed raw sorrow from burlesques of politics, from banalities of wealthy boors, from a lawyer's cloyed detachment, from the apathy of judges' prose.
He paused, fondled the page, thought to tear it. Then he wrote:
How like lace that ornaments a whore!
He bit his lip, soured his mask (like a taste of spoiled rice), and slashed a line through the fragment. "Will I regret that kill?"
He considered how the fragment linked its precursor — "that slate and algae" (raw sorrow...wealthy boors...) — with the apprehension seeping from him, "a dry, bony scent of path":
Evil draws pity — its own, for self, and ours, for hope in its complexity, not just what its father lost to crushes that made him. But, from evil's source — so frail — as from how many good witnesses, the victim earns bare regard, unless a cynic's, his boredom, his scorn.
He downed his pen, ripped the page into debris, stared beyond his window's shutters. Electric switched. He started rocking like a buoy, as if a meditating rabbi or autistic child.
Scant furnishing allowed his workroom the aura of a friar's cell. Books, papers — they piled around his desk, crept onto it. The walls' grey-blue bore nothing but a white wolf's face, arctic, yellow eyed, dusted with snow, scavenged from a calendar. One window, the northerly, showed balding oaks, a garden sleeping, a mauve house poising to fall. Another, the west, attended redwood, cedar, spruce, and fir, cottonwoods and swamp-grass of long, wide canyons, and silhouettes of green, table hills, gruff as distant.
Mary — her lips — awakened him to iron light, from dusk gelling under layers of clouds. He thanked her, rose, stroked her head. His look and fingers measured each curl of blackness.
She reached for his shoulder. He turned away to sit, limp, at his computer.
He started rocking, again, like a float. His eyelids enveloped what they husbanded, the way his hands would cup Mary's breasts.
Mary wore an orchid. Joseph bought it for her — to hallow no occasion but his envisioning the bloom would yearn to imitate the flower of her loins. She disappeared to the hip of their river, its white rush hissing like an edge of sea. Poplars bowed to acknowledge Mary's coming. In the dying light, their mosses mimicked her hair. A haze spread — leaden, wet, like surrenders of elk downed by panthers, like a man's resignation.
Joseph stopped rocking. His mind swelled, sank, drifted into salt crescendos. In its hollows, visions hatched like milkweed seeds, searching for vessels, their latencies befitting "a corpse's belly, a floe of ambergris, a chocolate mousse."
"Here words loom an avalanche of dread — resin oozing acrid perforations." He rubbed his brow and bobbed. His chair stumbled. "Drowning grants breath — warming in the cool of peace."
His head trembled, as if Parkinson's-diseased. He scarred away — till invisible — everything he'd just written. "Even horses get St. Vitus' Dance." Mary heard him shout: "Noël! Noël!"
He stiffened his limbs — a child dreaming he could fly — and reeled himself toward center, a kite wound-in with spindled string, now tenant of a working farm, down to business, harrowing and chopping-out, for bread and silver. His face clenched, a desiccating fruit. As if a new nun's yielding of her hair, hands clamped senseless on space, he promised his language that he'd winnow all emotion. But he worried the oath harbored slag — as would swearing off sugar.
He pinched his cheeks, tried to wriggle their spare flesh, as if to ruddy his prospect — with penance. His fingers slipped.
With a few, hammering keystrokes, he banished entire paragraphs, even pages. Verbs rammed his providence. His will jumped ship. Only faith remained — naked, shivering, on patched intuition.
His computer retrieved a copy of what he'd mutilated — still whole. Again, later, he would cut and alter it, syllable by syllable, mark by mark.
"Mary. Where are you? I'll make dinner now." As always, like a polygraph, he felt how his voice — its rhythms, tones, and pitches — belied his strife.
══════════════
That Thanksgiving brought blizzard to the cotton country. Master gave Noël a lantern for the trek. She held it low ahead. The snowing thinned since he expelled her.
* * *
"Yawl ghit outuh this heeuh room, No-ël." He named her after a French girl who jilted him before he inherited his uncle's plantation. Always he mispronounced the name — accent on first syllable, second split off, like another word. "Ah done
sold
yuh, Ah said."
In the bed, beneath its canopy, another girl spread herself, as often Noël had, after dishes, while awaiting the Master's use of her loins. On the sheet, the girl's flesh looked stark as charred wood.
"Gw'on ghit yawl vittles at y'
new
Mastuh's house. Yawl's
his
'n now. Ah
sold
yuh."
* * *
Noël could see faint lingerings of footprints on the ground blanched crisp beneath the low stems of scrub oaks and yellow pines. She would follow the step-signs pointing forward. They would lead her to her new owner's farm.
Her breaths plumed out to vanish in the pale orange glow. Her chest inhabited the aura's trailing edge that blurred behind, through wan grey-pink to blackness pressing at the marks her feet sowed, few heartbeats before.
Her flesh forgot its hue in the snow beneath the lantern's shimmering issue. The white, brisk, lucent, declared her skin a teak near sable. The orange, warm though mute, interpolated jumbles of sienna, rust, chestnut, umber, gold... Moisture confounded the melange on the showing curves of her feet, the troughs and rises at the long bones, the hollows at the toes.
Above, in the last reach of the lamp's illumination, oak limbs mimicked shifting veins of coal. A beast's scream pierced the wind, thick around her. She lurched a crooked part of spin, as if charged by wet electric, though she'd heard such shrieks often, long as her memory.
Her grip loosed the lantern. Before she could sound the word "no," the steel cage capsized in a drift of crystals. She fumbled after it. The oil doused its flame. She felt the slick ooze drool into snow.
Her knees knew well the maneuvers of scrubbing floors. Her fingers would trace the footprints ahead. The shapes would point her to her new home.
She retrieved the lantern, to requite it. With her free hand, she felt around her till she found her last tracks, the deepest of the trail. The toe marks said the way.
* * *
"Now take off them house duds, No-ël, an' ghit yawl self in some field rags. Y'ain't gonnuh be heeis whore anih more'n Ah been want'n yawl damn sick hole these score uh days. An' buhsides, Ah ain't wastin' good gahrments on anih damn bitch Ah sold away."
In a corner of the root cave, cook retrieved a dress she'd worn years past for picking. Nine harvests frayed it tender. Bugs had nibbled its dank on earthen floor. It had surrendered airy as the lace of gowns the Mistress wore on silk chemise at summer balls.
Noël shook the dress, brushed it in and out. But she didn't own time to wash it.
Noël glowed — sleek, black, like a polished limousine. Her frame stretched long as Mary's. Joseph watched her glide the dress down over her body, the cotton-white dissembling into holes and yielding to clay-stains and dust fixed by mildew. The hem — its tatters — trickled over flesh and curves, like fingers larking. The pale drenched her with a contrast transfixing as Mary's hair feathering her face and shoulders.
Joseph joined Noël with Mary. The two played anthelmintic to his guilt.
* * *
Noël lifted her skirt, knotted it high, and crawled as if a dwarf bear groping toward its winter hibernation. Every few paces forward, she rubbed her hands between her thighs, so her fingers could still find tracks to follow.
Shapes — space shapes, line shapes, solid shapes, sound shapes — shapes conjure feelings as they mirror them. Feelings live as shapes — of geometry, of rain and wind, of the crackle of a winter leaf, of a scream. Just so, as Joseph felt Noël's torment, he saw the sounds of her breathing and the vectors of her limbs crawling. He heard the trigonometry of her fear, her pain.
The whole array evolving — senses, colors, movements, angles, curves — the whole composed a mannerist hymn: her arms' reaches, their ever changing straights and bends, line after shape, shape after line, piling upwards, stretching, like fever, the constituents of bitter chords that shred the snowflakes, their crystals sounding-out a counterpoint colliding into whites and reds that merged, in ligatures, a cat's cradle unfolding. And Joseph touched his empathy and hand to Noël.
Her loin — its flesh — shed the heat of coal stoves just before morning. Her legs melted the planes of the snow they furrowed. Sweat teared from her head, frosted her brows and lashes, the braids striping her temples, the curls grazing her neck. Her lips burned.
At joints, her bones felt brittle, like vacant shells. They transmitted the lightnings of ravaged nerves.
In her eyes, blood sprawled like webs of fire. Her breath wheezed gravel through the shriveling spans among coughs.
While the lantern still made light, she'd watched red spray and fleck the snow before her. Now, too, she could taste the salt of crimson thrusting from below her throat.
* * *
Outside, six columns supported the roof of the cypress portico, which could cover two coaches, four horses hitched to each. Its forward edge described a quarter-circle. No two men could link arms around any of the columns. Their capitals feigned Ionic design. Atop the building's center, a Latin dome rose nearly high as the columns' reach.
Randy wondered: If he bisected the columns laterally, could he guess the building's age by counting the strata of white paint, which was layered everywhere thick enough to block sight of the structure's constituents (masonry, wood, stone?) — except the iron eagle perched at the great dome's peak?
Opening the building's bronze-clad main door centered beneath the portico, Randy entered the marbled hall that ringed the building's innards. The many windows aligned their cool, blue panes beyond touch, two legs higher than pinnacles of nordic men. Rising airs buffered the interior against torpor heating outside.
Dead ahead, he could see the portal of the grand court. He heard a thicket of voices pressing toward him. But he could not reckon the words raveling their tendrils into impermeable melange.
His eyes startled at a razor of light flashing between the court's portal and the floor. As he walked toward the reflections, his shoes squeaked on beeswax dense as a hive's.
He pushed ajar the two swinging doors, varnished so their wood's grain flared. His shoes trod silent on the wool of the carpet, green like moss on the aisle that led to his goal — a desk stationed behind the attorney's bar.
Autumn last, his wife tailored his "portfolio" — a carpet bag sewn of swatches of Persian rug. He laid it on the desk, and against the mahogany, the fabric's ruby, sapphire, gold, and pearl emitted a bouquet of brothel. He could feel a dutiful shock of many eyes.
Chest clenched, breath shallow, he shook his arms as if ridding them of heavying sludge. A hand patted his back. A steel voice pierced the fuzz of whispers clouding the room.
"Hel-lo Randih. Damned hot, fuh week aftuh New Yeeuhz."
The voice said something about gentlemen, winning, and pleadings. Randy turned and bowed to his opponent.
"Yawl heard thuh news, Randih? 'Bout Andih Jacks'n."
"Can't say Ah have, Chahlih."
"Well Andih done got heeimself ee-lected Pres'dent."
"That's bad, Chahlih. All thuh wahight trash gonnuh ghit real upp'ty — make all sawts uh dumb claims uh rahights an' make a damn mess uh things."
The judge imported the bench from England. Cherry formed the bulk of its frame. Chestnut and maple embellished its face. Near a forward corner, a carved walnut gavel, ivory inlaid, rested on a hickory pad. On one side, the nation's flag hung, furled. Centered just above, George Washington looked forward from a primitive portrait done with oils.
As if drawing raffles, Randy picked some documents from his portfolio. He spread them on the desk, and rummaged them, as if to find the best surprises in a mystery lunch.
"Now don't yawl fret none, Randih. Ain't nothin' gonnuh change — 'xcept fuh ou' ben'fit.
Ah know Jackson fooled lotsuh folks tuh think'n he's some populist sawt. But thayet's just a damned ruse Andih's old crony Will Blount came up weeith tih get out th' West vote fuh his pro-té-gé, ou' frayind Andih."
Charlie huffed and searched Randy's stare for grasp. Randy started cleaning beneath his fingernails — with his fingernails.
"Aftuh all, Andih stahted out uh debt col-lectuh, married intuh Col'n'l John Don'lson's ole reeich, ah-ristocratic, land speculatuh's fam'lih settled in Nashveeille from Vir-ginia, an' Aaron Burr fuhrst got thuh idee uh makin' Andih Pres'dent. Land speculatin' took uh hold good uh Andih, an' he bought himself an' sold away uh whole lotta thousands uh aycuhs an' spent passels uh heeis time racin' hawrses an' bettin' on fahight'n' cocks."
Randy scratched his neck, swiveled his head, wiggled his shoulders, and returned to cleaning his nails. Charlie snorted deep, squinted, cocked his head down and round to his side and back up frontward again. "Hmh." For a particle of time (so subatomic Randih didn't notice), Charlie's cheeks clamped his nose so its sides furrowed at top, and his forehead jacked his brows 12 degrees and squeezed the skin between into U-shaped ruts and rises, upside down, one piled on another, a geometry of pinching rainbow. Randy coughed. A sigh straightened Charlie's face.
"Well Randih: That Great Panic some yeeuhz ago made thuh poouh West rahight good prey uh anih man could suck it eein. An' Andih did one spec-tac-uluh job uh doin' just thayet, 'cause eein '21, he sided up wi' Ed Ward — Tennesseean blue blood down tih bone an' thee 'risto-crat candidate fuh Gov'n'uh uh his state. Yawl know awl that, Randih?" Charlie nodded "no" — while asking.
"But Randih, it's moh 'n that. Martin Van Buren, damn New Yawk yankih, an' strict con-structioneeist, he hooked up tight with Andih. An' Andih showed heeimself rahight willin' tuh co-erce thuh states anih way he wawnted, but onlih fuh heeis int'rests, like makin' th' Pres'dency strawng as thuh throne uh England 'couple-uh cent'ries ago — just fuh Andih's powuh.”
Randy began laying out his files and sorting papers, as if the judge were materializing at the bench. Charlie's look reverted to his childhood — when he wouldn't have savvied Randy's diversion; and his whole body stiffened for resolve.
“An' Andih hid his true colluhs from thuh poouh West folk, by makin' th' issue nothin' but vindicatin' thayuh hero, 'gainst thuh trumped-up 'co-rruption' some say got Adams ee-lected last time ev'n though Andih won thuh pop-u-luh vote."
Randy examined his pocket watch, and Charlie started poking a curved finger repeatedly down into space, the gesture resembling the harvest behavior of certain ground-feeding birds.
"Andih made them think they was vindicatin' them-selves, thuh 'people', as if Andih ehvuh was one uh them."
The bailiff came in, behind, through swinging doors, down green carpet. He marched between the desks and through the gape of the bar hewn of sycamore. In his uniform — crimsoned midnight, braids dangling white off epaulets — he looked a soldier in parade. At his waist, a brass sheath comported a sabre. His hands hauled a bush of feathers and yellow cloth — which he took to the bench, to dust it everywhere and polish its top. He kept nodding affirmation as he stowed his tools behind the bench and stood, trembling, by the flag, as if poised to kiss a general.
Sun spread in curled waves from the seven, quarter-globes of windows arced around the bottom of the dome, beyond the alder cornice. The flag seemed a mass of salmon — sea and silver — wearing warpaint, and dangled from invisible cord that gathered the bodies limp at their tails. The bailiff's hat prouded-out a brim like a platypus bill. From beneath it, sweat escaped as if diamond pellets and chips of amethyst spilling from a cache.
Randy's neck endured a high, straight collar, starched hard and wrapped with lush ribbon tied with a bow that trailed trains draping like tongues of big dead lizards. Under his chin, his flesh oozed brine that made his skin feel scorched. He grew up wearing buckskins, open at the throat. Grandma made his clothes then.
"Yawl know whah Andih led wawrs 'gainst th' Seminoles an' Creeks. He said he'd open Injun land fuh common folk tuh settle an' make uh fair livin' on. But he meant tih ghit mawr layend 'vailable for heeim tuh speculate weeith. So, don't yawl fret none. Andih's just ou' kind."
Randy recalled the Cherokees — Grandma's people — helped Jackson crush a savage tribe (Creeks, he thought) that massacred a town of Whites. "Hey Chahlih, judge's comin' eein. Yawl know he's uh Boston Yankih?"
The judge's chambers lay beyond the courtroom's inner wall, behind the bench. You might not notice the door, which opened into the chambers. It seemed a panel of wainscot wall — tulip, locust, oak — a segment the bailiff might have cut with jigsaw and hung on inner hinges so no one would find it, like the portal of a Pharoah's tomb.
"Yayuh, Randih. Got heeim uh
Hahvuhd
law diploma. Came down heeuh just aftuh thuh last wawr 'cause some uncle got killed fahight'n' with Jacks'n at New Aw-leans an' left heeim thuh ole plan-tation on th' edge uh thuh swawmp — left heeim all thuh nigguhs too."
From one window's light, a tubular beam channelled itself to the blotch of darkness where the judge's head was emerging. His hair sparkled like wet kelp under full moon of clear of winter night. His eyes obscured all radiance around them, and in the land of Puritans, they might have got him slaughtered for sorcery. Heat plays many tricks.
"Ah heard this judge made uh will that frees all heeis nigguhs an' gives each one uh hundreh dahlluhs. Gonnuh be rahight fun tryin' this case buhfaw heeim, Chahlih."
* * *
A possum hissed. Noël looked up. Soon she could touch the two dim lights a fingertip apart. She gasped, then stiffened long as if dead whole days — before she breathed again. Already
her fingers worked like dry twigs. Her hands and wrists seemed welded to her arms. She lifted her skirt, bent her torso down, put her teeth to the fabric, ripped out a ribbon-swath she left attached at one end. She tied the swath around the lantern's handle, to suspend the lantern from her dress, to render both hands free.
Along her limbs, her lone sense was burning, not from her blood, but like hydrogen ice — except a feel like bruising deep in her joints and the sockets of her hips. Over her thighs and torso, her skin feared all contact — her garment's every landing a warrior's slash. Crawling made her flesh a carpet on the path of spooked elephants and buffalo.
Sleep became her mother's embrace, a caldron of food. She closed her eyes and tasted a stew: rice, corn, fish, roots, scallion, garlic, onion, greens, cumin, chile, herbs. An instant passed like a dream, and she shook herself awake, her tongue parched deeper than the earth was moist beneath her knees. Death strode her yearning, like a satyr.
"O Lawdih. O sweet Jesuhs. Ah beein good. Ah dooin no hahrm. Mastuh made me sin. He beat me bayid if Ah didn't. Lawd Jesuhs. Mercih Lawd. Mercih."
An owl hurled a huge cry round across the forest, and the whole night became a void inside a whorled shell washed upon a powder shore. The Earth merged with heaven.
"Thank yuh Lawd. Oh thank yih sweet Jesuhs."
Noël lifted her shoulders, straightened her arms, tilted her head near back. She imagined herself a lioness. She struggled to make her fingers claws. They stayed clenched like a squirrel's when it's eating. Their nerves couldn't find the footprints in the snow.
"O Lawd. Ah yawl fool? Yawl punish meh so!"
The forest thinned. Clouds severed. A full moon shone through. Noël could see her way. She stood to walk and huddled her fingers in the warm shelters between her body and arms.
"Ah sorrih Lawd. Ah's wrong tuh doubt yawl. Good Jesuhs, thank yawl foh f'giv'n' dis sinnuh. Ah so sorrih Lawd. Ah so sorrih."
She walked fast as she ever had — to urge her energy. The effort made her breathe hard, cough more blood.
Red spurted and gushed from her mouth down her jaw, splattered her shins and feet, the skirt and bodice of her dress. It stopped her air at the delta of her throat.
She leaned against an old pine till her lungs laxed and their coughing relented. She craved to sink into earth, to sleep. But she remitted her body to its trek — slow as a dirge mounting.
Above, the blackness cleared, and clouds slipped east as if gauze curtains lifted from a summer window. Stars began to surface, like cargo from a wrecked ship yielded to a gorging sea.
At the forest's floor, Noël numbered out her steps among shadows netting all things lighter than themselves. As if kindred, her legs stroked the long dark shapes shifting under wind.
On her chin, her heart's wine thickened, muting to an umbering rust. She erased it with the flesh of her wrists, wiped them on the hind of her waist. At her ankles, red tainted snow and darkened into ice. Through a period of steps, sweat replaced blood below her lips, crystallized in the hair above her eyes — and on her dress, slicked against her body.
"
Whoahn
, two, tray, foh. Whoahn,
two
, tray,
fohuh
. ..."
Noël knew a slave who fought with Jackson, and Kentuck and Tennessee militia, and Creoles and pirates — at New Orleans. He told about the White sergeant teaching slaves to walk in rhythm to a four count. Sometimes, night-times, the slave-folk gathered at a fire. The old slave regaled his fellows with yarns of forced marches north of Mississippi to the old canal between the swamp and river, and the palisade they built to thwart the Brits. He high-stepped big squares and numbered off his strides, one to four — among swatches of history embroidered with gun and death.
So she counted fours aloud, as if conveying her body to war. With her mantra, like the Om mani padme hum, its code of fancy, like the Gospel or the old slave's tales, she numbed her fear and dulled the blistering of lung, the searing of cold.
"
Whoahn
, two, tray, foh. ..." Often her throat warped the cadence. "Whoahn,
two
[cough]. Tray [cough blood]. Fohuh."
* * *
"All rahz. All rahz. Th' hon'rable judge...."
Randy combed his fingers over his ears, through black cascades. He recalled the way Grandma groomed her hair — back tight, long braid coiled up, snakelike, hand's breadth above her neck. Before he started school, she would sit him on her lap, and he'd rest his head on her breast, and she would hold a book out and read to him. He could look up and make his vision trace all the contours of her face, which her hair submitted, full, to search.
* * *
Her hands warming in the crotches of her arms and her bottom limbs conscripted to her march, Noël could forget their condition. But she couldn't ignore the sting in her ears, exposed and stiff, protruded but neighboring her brain. The awareness raked her heed from ardor of deliverance.
She kept her hair Spanish style. She had stabbed a comb into the root of the whorls she bunned a knife's-width from her crown's edge. She plucked it up and made its teeth part her hair at the thread of her skull and scour its black wool down upon her ears.
The job chewed thick time. Her hair, a million helix curls, trained itself to any shape it bore for good duration. She scrubbed it to her jaw, but it curved out at bottom, like warped, bulbing wings. She'd have tied it around her chin, as if a kerchief, were it like a mane.
Still, it began to muffle the cold where she needed protection. And she laughed thinking how it made her head appear. But the laughter cracked her lips, rallied her cough's eruptions, made her feel faint. For a few held breaths, she wanted to weaken and cry, again to resign herself to sleep.
She let herself imagine the solace of the instant she would pass from waking through the onslaught of unconsciousness to oblivion. Jesus must have felt such peace that moment when his head fell limp and he sighed his body's expiration.
"Sweet Jesuhs, can Ah come t'yawl now? Ah soooo huhrt an' tired. An' if Ah doesn't ghit tuh mah new Mastuh's house real soon, Ah's gwawnna ghit whuhpped an' mawr bloodih, an' Ah doesn't know how Ah kin take anih mawr."
* * *
The judge sat himself at the bench. The two attorneys stayed standing, though the bailiff said "Yawl be seated."
The judge wore a long black robe, and gold-rimmed reading glasses, set below the bone of his nose. Randy wondered why His Honor broke tradition — didn't don a white wig.
The judge lifted the gavel and struck it on its pad twice. The percussion reverberated through the room like the prickly sound boat-timbers make on a muscular sea, but faster and louder, like torture whips. The judge tipped his head to peer across the tops of his glasses toward the two attorneys standing almost at attention, each to the outer side of his desk.
Randy, gaunt and lank, wore his head two hands higher than the next tallest human there. He could look almost straight ahead — level — and return the judge's glare. Out in the light radiating down from the windows in the dome, the judge's skin looked wan, his hair dull as old hay dry enough to turn a lathered horse from tasting it. He gave new poignance to the brass of the pole that hung the flag.
"Call case number 29. Are counsel ready?"
The judge might have played the deep bass part — the Commendatore — in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Randy looked down to see the floor open and Hell gape through. Charlie jolted as if a sudden gale scooped him in.
Randy thought of the night he heard young Mendelssohn perform a Bach toccata on the organ of the Cathedral at Chartres. The first two lines resounded through every column and vault and the air became the plangent sum of their thunders of flourish and harmony. Then the great beast's strongest voice bellowed its lowest note. He felt a tremor reaching through the structure's massive foundation and to the tops of its towers and into all its flying buttresses and walls — a convulsion like love in Eden.
Had this judge such power? Had the law, or the forces that conceive or manifest it?
"Chahlz Slade, counsel fuh plaintiff — readih, Yawl Honnuh."
Charlie sounded as if he'd just reached puberty. Randy tried to make his voice's volume, if not its depth, compete with the Judge's elocution.
"Randall Du Bois, counsel fuh
Dee
-fendant. Readih, Y'Honnuh."
Randy might have done as well whispering. He wouldn't force his voice again. Knowing the judge's next question would require Charlie to answer first, Randy sat down at his desk.
"Counsel, how do you plead?"
Somehow Randy couldn't arrange himself to avoid discomfort. Discreetly as he prayed, he shifted his position, slightly, many times through the silence between that question and the beginning of Charlie's response. He craved to stand — to writhe and flail his limbs to loose his garments from the sweat that drenched his skin.
* * *
Noël shook her head almost imperceptibly — much as the stiffening cold and her throbbing bones allowed — and slapped her arms just at her shoulders. Her eyes, half boiling, squinted as she tilted her face a few degrees down and quickened her pace, about a quarter beat faster.
Her forehead still perspired, like her neck, her loins, her torso. The brine frosted in the fabric of her dress — slicked to her skin — and it collected as ice in the hair of her brows.
She coughed a clot of blood, big as a cherry, stopped breathing for a few steps, then started cadencing her gait again — but deadly slower.
"Whoahn. ... Two. ... Tray. ...
Foh
uh. ..."
As she cadenced aloud, she thought a counterpoint.
"O Lawdih. Lawd Jesuhs. Mercih Lawd, mercih. ..."
She counted one to four many times, many as the trees she'd passed along the path that night in the forest. The path widened, and she reached the edge of a clearing. She dropped her hands to her hips, collapsed to her knees, stretched her arms out forward, and began to weep. She could not raise her voice much beyond a whisper, like sand spilling from a goblet.
"O Lawd. Ah sees it, Lawd. Mastuh's plan-tation."
She looked hard as ever she could. But she couldn't detect a light in any building.
She couldn't wake the Master or any of his family. The Master would beat her, surely.
She saw a lantern hanging from an iron hook nailed to the barn, near the side door. She removed the lamp and shook it enough to feel that someone had filled its belly. She tilted it until its oil drenched its wick, then returned it to the hook.
She put her hands between her thighs, close to the place where they joined, and rubbed her fingers at the flesh there — till they felt the burning sense that told they could serve her plan. Then she began crawling and scratched the ground to find some flint.
She found one stone, then a second, struck them together, discovered a third and struck it at the first, and worked a like trial on a fourth and a fifth. The sixth sparked brightly.
She rose and put the stone in her mouth, and returned her hands to the warmth of her thighs and rubbed them there, long, so they'd manage their next work. Then she loosed from her dress her old Master's lantern, retrieved the other from the hook near the door, took both inside, searched, with her feet, for dry straw, and made a little stack.
She set the oil-full lantern on the floor, and, flush against the piled straw, struck the other's steel with the stone — once, then again, then a third time, and again, and more and faster — till the straw ignited. As a mantis snares its prey, she snatched the other lantern to the fire, lit it well, and snuffed the tinder with her hands.
For a moment, she luxuriated in the glow of the lantern, its flame leaping, whirling in the playing airs inside, flailing the light's shifting spectrum on the myriad shapes around her. She cupped her hands above the warmth rising from the lantern's glass, and breathed a sigh, sensual as a lover's, but brief and shallow, for she feared her blood would explode again from her lungs.
In a far corner, she saw an empty stall, fresh straw on its floor, two horse-blankets draped on its rail. She hooked the lantern to a nail jutting from the corner-post, wrapped herself in the blankets (their wool rasping her skin), and fell on the billow of stalks, ice melting from her dress and shins and the hair of her brows, her lungs gushing, her jaw quivering, her chest torrid.
Once, twice, several times again, she adjusted her position by tiny degrees — to escape the sick, bruised feel in her joints and the middle reaches of her bones. Then exhaustion stilled her.
In the next stall, a pony stood, surveying Noël. Mane and tail looked cream against her fur — chocolate, curled and jutting all directions, like a White boy's hair before breakfast, raggedy and cowlicked. Beneath her teats puffed from milk and suckling, a foal sprawled on his side, his eyes shut hard, his legs stretched lock tight. The pony's tail whisked like clock-counts. Her nose twitched then wrinkled like a washboard. She curled her lips, raised her head out crooked, and neighed — so Master wouldn't hear. Three long breaths, and Noël began sleeping.
══════════════
If you watched Joseph consider the envelope, his hands pondering it, you might have recalled some movie where a deadly microbe threatens life's extinction and white-suited humans maneuver long-armed calipers to examine specimens cloistered in an airtight cage of glass. Brandon Tolly wrote the return address and Joseph's name, but Joseph's father wrote where Joseph lived. Had the two conspired some furtive harm?
Joseph imagined himself slicing the envelope and snatching out a surprise from a time just before he refused Bar Mitzvah and his father cried as he beat him for denying he was a Jew. There loomed Tolly, stilting around in darkness like a dogbird. Dogbird?
Tolly didn't walk or run, but clambered through space on too-long, gangly legs that looked like wooden contraptions scrounged from a failed medieval war machine. Dogbird? Joseph-the-lawyer examined the term (his own, instant invention). "If you ask enough questions, your query answers itself."
"If a bird-dog chases birds and points or sets at them, do dogbirds hunt dogs? Or do they seduce the dogs that track them, as a rodent snares its rattler end? So, is a dogbird an aviary quarry born for dog-beasts to undo — or, contrairement, for discomfiting the hounds of prey, or trapping them, as maiden laps lure unicorns? ..."
Joseph's head shuddered, the way canids shake off water. "Dogbird" stood a balance-weight against Tolly's body — equally preposterous. A Tolly-world pooch spits dogbirds.
But, though the gull and albatross clumsy themselves in land-trodding, they manage air and water as swans can't — better than fish or planes. Tolly — just new to 9th grade — young Tolly captained all the other life-guards at a big, walled spread of swimming pools that Joseph visited only when all his cohorts did and he would while alone if not joining them.
Always, Joseph hated being in water — pool, creek, ocean, bath, shower — though he loved riding boats on the sea. He couldn't breathe when he washed his face; but he laughed through a hurricane one Atlantic crossing.
A couple times little Joseph put his person in the shallow end of the deep pool Tolly guarded; and he pretended to swim. His body stood at 45 degrees, his arms mocking a swimmer's while his toes (left, right, left, right...) — contorted toes, "hammer" toes — pushed off the concrete floor, scraping as they pushed (the way a male dog's hind claws scratch the earth when he marks it). The pushings propelled him — in slow lurches — but abraded his skin.
Afterward, his toes bled underneath. His father beat him for getting hurt and bloodying his socks, and more for not telling how.
Joseph enjoyed watching Tolly play a live anomaly in water. No one seemed to swim so fast and easily; but everyone knows swimmers need bulk and Tolly's body made itself of little more than cartilage, nails, hair, and bone. Maybe God carved Tolly from oak. Trees float. But Tolly didn't mark little Joseph with wooden memories.
Tolly's father gave twenty years to the Navy, for forty pounds of extra weight. Now he worked a watchman's shift that started at the close of Joseph's dinner time. Often, after stuffing food in his pockets and throwing it down a sewer, Joseph hung out at Tolly's place, an upstairs duplex a block from Joseph's house, across from the grammar school Joseph no longer attended.
The kitchen drew nearly all the place's waking life around its pine table and maple chairs. The dining room did storage duty, relentless between trash days. The parlor gripped perfection with disuse. Even insects preferred the kitchen — the gum of smoke tar, the nutrition on the floor.
Often Tolly tuned the radio to a station that broadcast Lightnin' Hopkins and Howlin' Wolf and a fledgling John Lee Hooker, still plucking "acoustic" guitar; and Joseph began to understand counterpoint. Tolly played a 12-string Gibson, an ƒ
-hole. Sometimes he sang with the radio, but only oldtime country songs (because his white boy's ticker pumped no blues).
Sometimes Tolly soloed, always a song called "Marie." The harmonic structure startled Joseph every time he heard it — even each new verse in each lone hearing.
His hands continuing to ponder the envelope, Joseph's memory replayed the song. His mind sounded the music. His mouth muttered the words, which he hadn't considered since, so long ago, he listened last to Tolly's singing them. Two lines amazed him still:
Marie, the dawn is breaking. **** To find, your heart is aching
Tolly gave Joseph beer and processed cheese (not Swiss) and hotdog mustard and American bread (not Jewish or Russian) and Coke (not seltzer). They played poker. But Tolly never offered Joseph a cigarette.
Tolly's dad bought the Gibson at a pawn shop, the beer in cases, the Coke the same way, the smokes in cartons, and food by the week — the cards, too, a fresh deck every month.
Joseph saw the cards again, as if he could spread them in his hands — as if he'd opened the envelope and found them inside. Their faces bore the usual things — diamonds, kings, jacks, spades... But their backs! Photos of whores in action — consummate acrobats, all with private parts blazing. But mostly Joseph remembered one red Sunday of the summer his loins became a man's.
Always Tolly slicked back his muddy gold hair. He slavered it with pomade — the kind blues singers used. He wore a plain white T-shirt, sleeves rolled high, the rolls narrow, tight — distended where he shoved a pack of Camels underneath. His deltoid muscles flashed tattoos of nude women taking "pinup" poses.
Already, two nights running, Tolly showed Joseph how to look at the backs of the cards and make his groin explode. Tolly demonstrated, silent. Joseph emulated, but screamed at the end.
Then, that Sunday of the sweating air, Tolly deposited Joseph on his bed and shuffled his dogbird body next to Joseph's. He hugged Joseph and held Joseph's member. Joseph barely heard Tolly's words above the hard wheezes of Tolly's breath when Tolly invited Joseph to copy him. Tolly helped Joseph's hand toward the pleasure Tolly craved. He said he loved Joseph — "like a brother."
Joseph metamorphosed — from a boy half Tolly's height to shapelessness, then to quivering of void, then to ice. Tolly vanished.
Joseph tapped the envelope, a narrow edge, on a kitchen counter — the way Tolly tapped a new pack of smokes and then each cigarette, to make the contents settle to one end. Joseph ripped the empty end, tilted it, and shook the letter out to the top of his desk. He stared at the paper till he needed to switch on a light. He opened the folds with the tip of a pen and put books on the top and bottom margins.
Tolly left school early for the Navy. He hated his classes, except "Spanish Conversation." Sometimes he sang "Marie" in Mexican.
This is most of what his letter said:
If you read this, your mother has rendered me the unearned kindness of forwarding it to you. ... Always I sorrow when I think your name. ... I ended our friendship with a blunt stroke. ... If you cannot answer, I'll understand.
Really their friendship imploded beneath the press of Tolly's fear of women and the brawn of Joseph's young sense of his own sexuality. Joseph felt compassion for Tolly, old and alone in a second-floor apartment in a slum.
Joseph didn't answer Tolly's letter; he couldn't imagine formulating anything honestly said. But the letter returned him to amending the note he journaled the morning he began this story:
She drove my touch into the marrow of her century, through morbidities that beset, alike, the cell tissue of my own times and all civilization before.
At last he found that language its Zen oblivion. But, known, forgotten, void breathes ambiguity, like metamorphoses; to Zen monks, fasting means whole rice and sips of water:
Forever, dark bears the savage of light — the hard of clear, the cut of its limits.
══════════════
"We shall proceed, then, counsel.
"Mr. Slade, how does Plaintiff plead?"
"Yaw Honnuh, thayet Plaintiff delivuhed tuh Defendant uh chattel accohdin' t' agreement Plaintiff made with Defendant an' Defendant has ruhfused tuh pay Plaintiff thuh prahce Defendant agreed tuh — though Plaintiff propuhly deemanded same from Defendant."
"Mr. Du Bois, how does Defendant plead?"
"Yaw Honnuh, that Defendant agreed tuh pay not just fuh thuh chattel but fuh title tuh eeit, that when Plaintiff's credi-tor recovuhed judgment 'gainst Plaintiff thuh sheriff duly executed on thuh chattel fuh Plaintiff's credi-tor who had uh lien on same tuh suhcure thuh debt adjudged in thuh judgment, that uh strangeuh puhchased said chattel at thuh sheriff's auction, that Plaintiff stole thuh chattel back an' thayen contracted tuh sell eeit t' Defendant, that therefoh Plaintiff deeid not delivuh thuh thing Defendant agreed tuh puhchase, ohrh, eein thuh al-ternateeive, that thuh chattel was dee-fective, materi-ally — not whawt Defendant agreed tuh ac-cept."
"Mr. Du Bois, you pleaded first either that the parties did not achieve a meeting of the minds or that Plaintiff did not perform and, therefore, lacks predicate for recovery. You pleaded next either that Plaintiff failed to perform and, so, lacks predicate for recovery or that Plaintiff made and breached a warranty the breach of which either excuses Defendant from performance or entitles Defendant to a money judgment Defendant can set off against Plaintiff's claim.
Now, Mr. Du Bois — and I notice your name is French — whatever our neighbor state, Louisiana, its French Code law, may let parties plead, like all
common law
jurisdictions, this state does not permit pleadings in the alternative or ambiguous allegations. So, you must pick one of those pleadings and stick to it. Which pleading do you choose?"
Near the bench, away from the flag, atop a green bronze pedestal between judge and witness box, an onyx maiden raised an iron scale. She wore a long Roman robe, its train draped around an arm extended as to offer grace. Her hair curled down like lace edgings on a rich child's pinafore. In an instant, Randy wondered: Did Justice cover her eyes to blind herself, or to hide?
"Mr. Du Bois, do you follow the court's logic? You seem distracted. Are you ill? ... If such precision disturbs you, Sir, I suggest you hone your perception on readings of reports of the seventeenth century Court at Westminster. For now, though, counsel may find some help in understanding of the procedural prospects inhering in the choice before you."
The bailiff blinked slow and hard. Randy's eyes heated.
"If the Parties join issue on the former pleading (really nonformation of contract), Plaintiff will bear the burden of persuasion but Defendant the initial burden of producing evidence. If, instead, Plaintiff denies defect, does not demur, Defendant must replead: The question will be whether issue joins on the fact of defect upon the premise that defect would defeat Plaintiff's performance, rather than on the fact of defect upon the premise that it would breach Plaintiff's implied warrant, the contract not expressing one.
If, of the latter two prospects, the first be the case, Plaintiff will bear the burden of persuasion and Defendant the initial burden of going forward. But if the second, Defendant may bear both burdens of proof — and will if Defendant's pleading implies set-off, rather than breach."
Randy's vision flickered back and forth from the judge's countenance to his desk, where he'd set one hand. The judge's head loomed a chiseled monument — greater than the body it marked. The forehead spread high beyond the hand's dimensions. The mouth resembled the eye-slits of Greek helmets. But the English robe disputed Hellenic trace.
"Or, counsel, Plaintiff may demur, admitting the chattel defective but arguing the law neither implies a warranty of fitness or merchantability nor allows recovery for delivery of unfit or unmerchantable chattel, except where the contract expressly provides. Should Plaintiff so demur, the issue joined would reduce to the legal question whether the law presumes the seller warrants the chattel's fitness."
Sometimes Grandma wore a dressing gown that looked Roman — all the mornings she came to Randy's room to carry him to breakfast. She lifted him, raised him high, sat on the bedside, snugged him on her lap, against her breast. Her gown gathered and folded, and he danced his face against its cool silk, its billows and curves, the yieldings of its folds and gathers. He smiled at the whisks it sounded as his head writhed against it so its random shapes collapsed upon each other.
Once, just before he went away to study law, Grandma told Randy how her people governed themselves before Europeans came. They knew a few customs that smoothed mundane affairs, made them easy, she said. But they suffered no rules. If one person seemed to hurt another or claim advantage empathy would refuse, the elders would tend the problem some way fair humans would appreciate, a way they wouldn't feel wrong, even if they felt it error.
"So, again, the court enquires, Mr. Du Bois: Which pleading do you choose?
Take chary option, sir. The prospects harbor
streams
of hard consequence."
The sun reached its pinnacle above the live-oak spreading its still-leafed branches over the violets beside the path to Randy's house. This night his wife would make a soupe de poisson and broiled squid-and-pimiento over brown rice and fried, lemoned greens. She would wear her lace peignoir. He would sip wine, blush, like her lips, to prepare himself to taste her offerings.
Always when they kissed in bed, she struggled to thread her breath into his, the way she once darned stockings — to suture their beings together. She failed, ever — but bore his children, cut their cords, the chaff of his yen to penetrate her surface, sometimes.
"Yawl Honnuh, Defendant pleads that Plaintiff delivuhed uh chattel that suffuhed a de-fect material tuh th'agreement — uh defect that made the chattel somethin' othuh than thuh pahrties agreed Plaintiff must dee-livuh."
"Mr. Slade, how does Plaintiff respond?"
"Yuh Honnuh, thayet thuh chattel was pree-ciselih whawt Plaintiff 'greed tuh delivuh an' Defendant agreed tuh ac-cept an' pay fuh."
"Mr. Slade, you're not French and owe no allegiance to the good state of Louisiana. Why, then, do you emulate your adversary and plead implicitly in the alternative — against my admonition to the contrary?"
At once, Randy's vision acknowledged the brass staff that hung the flag and the silver buttons on the bailiff's tunic and the gold rims of the judge's glasses and the wedding ring on his hand and, above, behind the bench, higher than the painted face of George Washington, the clean bronze inlay of the great seal of the state. Those phenomena all blared beneath the sun now seeming to focus, magically, on each alone through the same moment, as if the many were one.
The effect accentuated the ivory on the gavel and the points and swirls in the white of the marble walls. The judge's skull pressed at its skin, taut, except his jowls, as if the surface of a treble drum. His forehead rose higher than its breadth spread, and his jaw squared wide beyond his earlobes, his neck slender below his double chin, the whole form recalling certain bells or squashes. His teeth glistened when he uttered words like "Mister" and "way."
The dome collected light as if blood sucked into a chamber of vacuum and failing gravity, and it impressed upon the room a racking brilliance that merged with the judge's intellect and ripped Randy's attention. But the gambit was Charlie's. And, for relief, Randy quelled his care.
"Yuh Honnuh, Plaintiff pleads thayet Defendant knew thuh chattel's condition when he bahgained tuh puhchase eeit an' agreed t'accept it as eeit was, an' thayet, therefoh, Plaintiff's deliv'rih was puhrfohmance that binds Defendant tuh yield thuh con-siduhration he agreed tuh give — thuh prahyce thuh contract sayid."
Charlie's eyes opened big as pigeon eggs, his trunk tilting rearward, his chin tucked down and back, his breathing stilled. The judge scowled so his face became a gourd diminished in sweating sun.
══════════════
Noël appeared and measured against Charlie and Randy and Joseph and the judge. Joseph stopped writing to re-examine another of his stories, one he'd written three times and set aside till it seemed a swarm of aliens, to be culled, ejected, quarantined, constrained, and reaculturated with the zeal of immigration cops and bigots. One passage froze his attention with new sight of his struggle to find a language of truth:
"Joseph!" [His father called him Joseph then.] "Joseph!" [Joseph lay in bed, as he did every morning, unable to get up, pretending he could hide, waiting for another of the inevitable.] "What's this, Joseph? One sneak, hidden in the basement! Where's the other? Don't lie to me, you ungrateful brat! I work hard for my money!"
Down fell the sneaker. Down went Joseph's underpants. Off the bed with Joseph, grabbing hold of anything, anything he could.
Off came the strap. Hard onto Joseph — hard on his butt, across his thighs, against his back...and hard all over, and over, and over, and over, again, and again...
"I'll teach yeh to waste my money. I'll teach yeh to disobey me. I'll teach yeh to do things right.……."
Where was mother? Mother! Oh God, your sister's screaming! Where was God?
That event, the real event, happened the summer before Joseph would enter third grade, in a new school. Workmen were raising the building on a four acre tract of bulldozed land across the street at the end of the block where Joseph lived.
The summer after first grade, a tree-of-heaven raid and plunder weeds and berry thickets vied to take an oak-held knoll on the tract. Frankie James stuffed Stanley Carson, Joseph, Benny Smith, and Johnny Scannepicchio in old nail-barrels (their heads and legs protruding out the topless tops and bottomless bottoms); and Frankie set them tumbling down the hill and shot them with air rifle pellets. A pellet gouged the sight from Stanley's eye. Then he wore a pirate patch.
Through waking hours and sleep, such gone events meandered Joseph's well of dreams. Like fish of the deepest deep, or uterine coils, they trespassed their meant environments, marauded conception. How much did they taint his story of The Cotton Country, its lives, its experience?
How could he plug the reservoir of such unconscious forces, so they'd dwell locked, strangers, secluded from his words? Or ought he burn them, all, out into the open, loose them, like Homeric furies, to command his language by ruling his blood?
══════════════
To Noël, dawn seemed hours early — more because escorted by her new Master's face, his maw jammed a thumbnail from her ear and venting, like petty cannon, a demand that she explain her presence. She hadn't gathered herself enough to compose a response, when he grabbed her arm, yanked her into standing, and dragged her, like a slaughter, from barn to mansion.
"Yawl mah new Mastuh, suh. Ah done dee-livuh'd mahself from yahnduh plan-tation."
Noël pointed south, toward the forest, away from the white fields wearied by cotton. Her body slid and stumbled on stones and ruts and mounds through the cypress and live-oak to the great white house, its six columns shouldering a portico like Sisyphus his rock. Inside, marble cooled the morning light diffusing softness like the tones of daguerreotypes. In the center of the main hall, a wide stair wound up to a gallery that circled the full interior, high above.
"Well stand up straight and let me inspect my purchase. You don't
look
how you did when I bought you — if you are what I bought. Stay here. Doc Jameson came last night. I'll ask him his judgment."
* * *
"Mr. Du Bois, how does Defendant answer?"
"Yaw Honnuh, Defendant submits that Plaintiff's pleadin' admits Plaintiff knew thuh chattel's dee-fective con-dition whayen Plaintiff induced Defendant tuh puhchase eeit."
The judge sighed and raised his jaw off the fist that supported it. His head torqued slowly around a few degrees one bearing, then as much the opposite — four times, the way dogs circle left and right before dropping to sleep. His finger toyed with the handle of the gavel. He shifted his hips to fore, leaned across the bench, and jutted his face toward Randy.
"The court gathers your submission to be a motion for a ruling. Plaintiff's pleading does not imply Plaintiff
induced
anything. Such inference requires Defendant's allegation and proof. Since Plaintiff's pleading surely implies his admission he knew the chattel defective when he sold it, the record requires no such ruling. But perhaps an enhanced emotional security will quicken Defense counsel's insight. So, the court rules Plaintiff's pleading admits Plaintiff knew the chattel defective when the parties entered their contract."
The judge hurled his body back into his chair and restored his jaw to its perch of fist. His loose hand brandished flicks and curls that told Randy "plead further." The audience emitted a rush of whispers, like breakers thrashing pebble shores. Randy coughed twice.
"Defendant denahz he knew or could've known thuh chattel's con-dition at or befawre he 'greed tuh puhchase eeit, an' Defendant pleads that Plaintiff puhrposely
pree
-vented
Dee
-fendant's learnin' thuh chattel's true
con
-dition."
"Does Plaintiff deny or demur?"
"Plaintiff denahz, Yuh Honnuh."
"At last, counsel,
joinder
. But the day wears fast. Proceed immediately to proofs. Now!"
* * *
A grey-haired man exited a room above, rounded the gallery, and descended toward the Master and Noël. The Master asked the man to examine her.
He looked in her eyes, felt her flesh, thumped at her belly, listened to her heartbeat and lungs. She coughed some blood. It sprayed his cheek and hair.
"This black doe's got fatal consumption and pneumonia."
The Master told her to take herself back to her old owner.
"You're defective. If I knew when I thought to buy you, I'd have rejected you
then and there
. Tell your owner I refuse you now. You hear? Understand?"
Noël's head slumped as she nodded acknowledgment and turned toward the outer door, her shoulders curled down forward. The grey-haired man asked the Master to give her some soup and bread and lend her a wrap and shoes.
"She's her
owner's
damaged goods. She's
his
problem. I won't waste my bounty on her. And if I do something to repair her, the law may say I've treated her as mine and can't reject her. I won't risk that chance."
Morning opened like a wide desert. Sunlight bloomed into immaculate sky.
Noël imagined the foal awake and sipping milk from the pony's breast. She saddened, an instant, because she hadn't, herself, mothered a child. She forced her thought back to returning herself to her old Master. Surely, he, too, would reject her. But she knew nought else to do.
Sleep and the morning's clear revived a taste of strength — however fragile — to subdue, briefly, the siege of her lungs. She stopped at a pond frozen black. Summers, she could see her image in it, watch her reflection undulate among water plants and tiny fish, their greens and silvered golds. Wind advanced and drove the cold against her. She became the prey of phantom wolves biting at her flesh.
She remembered something she learned from a strange old slave, not like the rest, imported from the South of Africa. Wild dogs eat their quarry live, while the creature's still struggling afoot. But shock numbs the beast, rescues it from pain.
Noël pressed southward, on vacant zeal, marching into space.
"Whoahn. Two. Tray. Cough. Whoahn. Two. Explode-blood.
Foh
uh. ..."
* * *
Both lawyers stood, their clients with them. The judge struck the gavel twice.
"In this case, tried to the bench, the evidence included the word of a physician who examined the chattel the morning of Defendant's receipt of her delivery. Unimpeached and uncontradicted, the physician said the chattel suffered fatal consumption and pneumonia and would not have survived a month, even if freed from toil and granted thorough rest and care."
Till now, the bailiff — even his mustache — stood starched to attention. But just this moment he shifted, near-invisibly, the positions of his feet and slackened down the measure of a razor's pitch. The judge drew a hollow breath, raised his head, offed his glasses, twirled them by a stem, and furrowed his brow, like the tip of orgasm. In the dense of light, his forehead appeared painted, like a savage's, with wandered stripes of blood dried brown.
"Defendant testified the chattel showed no sign of such defect when Plaintiff presented her for inspection before the sale. Plaintiff admitted as much. The physician said the chattel could have masked her symptoms for brief times, but he avowed that Plaintiff would have observed them, if, as evidence proved, the chattel kept Plaintiff company often and long.
Plaintiff admitted he ordered the chattel to present herself as if not ill when Defendant came to inspect her. Plaintiff's cross-examination strongly suggests he threatened he would punish her sternly if she did not appear fit."
Randy cocked his head and gazed sidelong through the dome, one eyebrow angling up like a hawk's wing along his temple. A falling radiance granted his face a tone like the pale rose glow some mannerist paintings render Mary, mother of Jesus. He breathed out long, just short of sighing. His whole body wilted, inch by inch, as if a high balloon cooling to return to earth.
"Under Defendant's questioning, without Plaintiff's objection, the physician testified also that he begged Defendant to give the chattel soup, bread, and warm clothing before Defendant set her to return to Plaintiff's possession. The court expects Defendant meant this evidence to show he did not equivocate about rejecting the chattel. The court rules the evidence immaterial. The pleadings do not imply an issue like estoppel. The law will not require rejection to bear a special quality of certitude, but merely clear refusal to accept."
* * *
Noël's body collapsed on the step at the kitchen door, her hand clasping a dead lantern. With the hue of speckled gulls, the worn granite lent a silhouette's relief to her body, its darkness, and her dress that blood and earth had browned and sweat had starkened where the cloth lay frozen off her skin.
Cook found Noël unconscious. She carried her to the alcove behind the stove. She nestled her, like a mother, in a pile of rags and tattered clothes, covered her whole with the butler's great-coat. With moistened cloth, she cleansed Noël of blood, caked and drying on her jaw.
Fresh snow covered Noël's tracks before her old Master unearthed her presence next morning. She lay, still, behind the stove. Her body, dry, cold, never awakened.
* * *
The judge struck the gavel gently, three times, dirge slow — as if mocking a priest's intonement of the bell that harks the censer's swinging. The room fell mute, like a sun exploding, as if the last flaps of fish suspended on land; and it lifted to the night that halves the moon.
"Though the court must rule immaterial, and disregard, Defendant's refusal to heed the physician's entreaty, this judge must express his dismay at both Plaintiff's and Defendant's treatment of the so-called chattel, a negro slave, some years shy of womanhood when she expired. Still, the law deprives this court of power to consider such matters — at least in this controversy, unrelated to the girl's plight."
If his Honor's wife embraced his Honor then, she'd hear his nose sniff, his gullet stir sodden growls. She'd feel his muscle grasp his bone as if in scaling iced mountains. But Joseph would chide His Honor's lesson that he ruled a common law court — which can make law, new law.
"Still, this court does hold power to discountenance one iniquity — bad faith, even fraud. And this judge finds some solace in repudiating the evil of Plaintiff's wrongs of Defendant."
The sun dimmed. The audience whispered. On the flag, the furls — their shadows — lost limit. His Honor struck his gavel thrice again.
The gavel awakened more of Joseph's past. A boy tied a magnet to a string, fed it through a grate, fetched up coins and costume jewels from a sewer. The boy spread the loot and counted the debates of Joseph and his students, Joseph's struggles to carve his students' thought into logic, to wizard their facts into doubt.
Joseph began weeping. His tears formed a sea. He bid his students voyage to a continent where empathy supplanted rules and justice.
The students sneered: "Asinine. Crazy." Joseph charted the vectors. I quote:
Wolves have hands and arms. They will kiss a fellow they down if he yelps and bellies-up, and they'll protect him forever.
De Sade refused a judgeship; he knew he could wreak every crime an accused might commit. Jesus bid only others to throw no stones; he claimed to be son of God, lorded over apostles, mocked his accusers with his turning cheek.
The Bushman lived forty millennia, without law or rules. The Bushman danced monsoons in desert. They couldn't translate "crime" or "guilt." They rustled cows because you can't steal food in a waste. They ran from war, but battled like leopards. They will feast a stranger till he bores them. They solve disputes by talking forever till their patience needs absence with another band.
All law errs, like vomit — from premise to effect: Law makes governments of men who act too late, like thunder, except, as if Christmas or gout, to foster greed, with ego, folly, blunder, ruse......
We know nothing, ever.
Sense says victims must horsewhip murderers: Quick torture works utility — better than prison or death. Vengeance spawns love. Punished innocents keep living — living free.
Every lawful state is a Nazi waiting to hatch or burying traces of shell.
Health means courage to risk others' tastes, in their territories.
We need to apprentice with whales.
To the east, volcanoes melted and the river whitened and swelled. Joseph peered into the black green beyond the poplars. His eyes darkened. His compassion reached over light — an old monk's fingers gaping through a maiden's hair. The judge and Charlie Slade and Randy hovered in a mist beneath mountains. And Joseph heard Noël forgive them with a riddle Christ bestowed: "They know not what they do."
Joseph poured Noël a tribute owed such strength that needs no pity. His empathy joined hers. It grew scarlet. He drank the solution.
"The court finds that Plaintiff knew the slave gravely ill when he bargained to sell her to Defendant, that Plaintiff contrived to keep the slave's condition a matter of Defendant's ignorance, that Defendant was induced to believe the girl was merchantable, as so she feigned convincingly for Plaintiff's threat when Defendant agreed to buy her, though, truly, she was, at all times material, the victim of consumption and pneumonia, fatal defects."
Charlie shoved aside his papers, flopped his arms to his lap, slumped back, and grimaced like the passion of a foiled shark, his whole head's skin gripping his skull as if by tourniquet. The judge glowered at Charlie, the way a tidal wave curves-out light.
The bailiff wound toward the bench — like taffy and Venetian glass. The judge pounded the gavel. Its handle shattered. Its head shot toward the bar. Charlie reddened and cringed.
"The court rules Defendant was entitled to expect the slave would be delivered healthy as she appeared when Defendant inspected her body and contracted to purchase her. The court adjudges Defendant not indebted to Plaintiff and dismisses the complaint, with prejudice."
Randy grinned wide and nodded his head three times. Charlie shook Randy's hand.
Randy collected his papers, stuffed them in his portfolio, like soiled shirts in a hamper, and left, walking on the balls of his feet. He paused at the thud of the outer door, slipped his gold watch from its pocket, and opened it. On the undersurface of its cover, he saw his reflection, distorted by the medium's concavity, the imperfection of its plane. He counted the columns before he stowed his watch and walked from the portico to the green of the square tarnished by a now-clouded sky.
* * *
A lieutenant prodded his horse toward Grandma's surrey. Randy stood to its side, his shoulders slumped, his head, sobbing, tucked in his hands, his belly convulsing tears to his eyes and down his cheeks and through his fingers.
The lieutenant reported the colonel commanded departure. He apologized, insisted he opposed the order, the expulsion of Grandma, her society, and regretted he lacked power to change policy.
Randy's eyes rolled high beneath their lids, and he began to collapse, to fall into spasms. He grabbed at the surrey's rail and drew his face to Grandma's glare. Once, then again, and again, he sucked in breath and pressed it out, to the bottom of his gut — till his blood could hold him conscious to speak.
"Let me sneak yuh home, Gramma. Ah'll smuggle yawl tuh Boston. Yawl be safe thayuhr."
She swivelled her hips so her body faced away a diagonal from Randy's. Then she lifted out her bent leg wide like a working whore's, trained her shoe at Randy's chest, and kicked him to the ground. He heard her whip the air, her surrey jolt away.
Arms out, eyes spread, mouth open, Randy lay rigored, back to ground, until his heart slagged its tempo to a limp. Then he arced one arm as if a catapult and swirled around, stomach under, jaw half buried in drying mud.
Clouds advanced like chariots. Skies erupted. Torrent nurtured mud. Mud cooled Randy.
He struggled to run, as if standing — his arms angled forward, bent at their elbows, his legs like set, but toward opposing aim. His limbs slipped in jagged swipes, as if he played a frog skimming the slick of backwater. In the brown slosh, his flailing brewed a moment of the shape of angel pressed against snow.
His body stopped scrambling. It flounced — a fawn resigning to a hound's starving bite. A murmur spread across his flesh. Pigs and elephants refresh themselves in mire. He curled his body, and his senses wallowed into sleep.
Dusk neared. His frame lurched upward from a precipice. He neck arched and his eyes scoured the horizon. Grandma — all her people — had disappeared.
The storm died rashly as it struck. Sin rushed from his memory, a river tumbling seaward, snows melting into spring. He lifted himself, his mind looking skyward from Grandma's breast. He stood resolved to live her pride. Like an ancient brave, he would weep no more — forever.
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Epilogue
Joseph regarded Randy's last stand, and he likened dignity to a finger's plunging past tongue to retrieve a fishbone stuck in a throat. He wrote his journal this note:
How many will think the tragedy the victims, or cruel scorns, or weigh Noël's afflictions by what pains of 4000 Cherokees dead on the Trail of Tears? We may crush beneath the iron of villains or greed, or authority's juggernauts. But from our quotidian yieldings to the microbes of law, its hard warpings, its cool and intricate misfocus and conceit, we learn the crippling sense that we must abdicate our lives to institutions, and their lords, however distant or intimate, brute or meek — as if empathy cannot manage freedom, as no one ever wept for Noël.
Death grows as crevices in worms.
[
footnote 2]
Joseph took a breath and read the note.
"Atavism! What keeps shooting me, wayward, into early forms of life, into strange, dead incarnations?"
He would save, for elsewhere, the note's final sentence, and gouge the rest from the page.
"But life, too, grows as crevices in worms." Did that final sentence occur as scourge of the rest? Or did he write it to hide the bloat, necrotic, before it?
"Suppose I told the reader outright, simply, what he ought to see, what he ought avoid deriving, what perceptions he ought discard, lest they decoy him to hate the wrong evils, the big ones swollen with frost and potent as semi-vacuums. Would the reader dismiss the warning as his program demands or because it's too horrible for civilized sanity?"
Joseph pushed away from his desk so his chair spun and crashed on its back. He stared at the ceiling.
"Maybe I'll turn the evil's means against the evil. That language [he meant the journal note's] — its tone (though not its diction) — it drones like Roosevelt's and Churchill's radio communions with their flocks."
Joseph studied the white face of the arctic wolf pictured, alone, on his wall. He entered its yellow eyes, got on his fours, cocked his head and howled. "If their spirits run with us [he howled more], they'll know the message before it's conceived."
Joseph dropped into lost, his mind a jungle night, dense snow falling. He let the note live, the same journal note, whatever it might become.
The next afternoon, sleet pounded down through hot light, thick wind slanting its collisions. When Joseph awoke, he rushed to his desk, grabbed his journal, ripped out the page that bore the note, burned it in his bathroom sink. While it flamed then smoldered, he mouthed many times its end idea — that death grows as crevices in worms.
The ashes resisted being flushed down the toilet. He felt his childhood toes pushing off a swim-pool floor, and he saw Brandon Tolly, and sang:
Marie, the dawn is breaking. **** To find, your heart is aching.…
"Carbon is the soul of life, the heart of dying. Soft, it smooths and floats. Hard, it forms diamonds."
[Blue struggled to envelop everything. Azure searched to weave itself around the feel of Mary’s sleep. In the tints and placids of lagoons once sapphired by a sky of open and June, one could see a cracking of the chrysalis that bore, as if enshrouding, the narrator’s vision. Joseph’s times will eddy all within an icing memory of deeps of turquoise glowing from the phosphorus of algae spangling errant seas.]
I saw Joseph twice after he stopped working at The Cotton Country. (I had yet to read the story then and knew of it only Joseph's musing that the title meant the deep of Ante Bellum South, a nub of being like a cotton burr, its fibers dry and ready to be scattered by wind.) When we said our last — I hope not final — goodbye, Joseph turned to leave, stopped, breathed out long and audibly, swivelled his head to look toward me, then whispered: "I renounced law."
I knew he had abandoned the profession. But I sensed his whisper meant more. Now I wonder how much more.
I consider Joseph's riposte to his students, and I worry for my own remark that Joseph envied "humor that played its damage as blithe accident, with compassion like a ninja's, which appears as lack." And I recall Joseph's kinship of wolves and his fantasy that gutted the butcher, hooked him by the head, and hung him to dry. And I pray we have not known our final parting.
Death lives a crevice of worm.
The case is Mahland vs. Wild Canid Survival & Research Center, reported 588 F.2d 626 (U.S. Ct. of Appeals, 8th Circuit 1978).
Joseph named Noël; for, she died nameless. But truly her story happened — as did the dispute of her buyer and seller, though Joseph simplified the case and changed the year and place of its events to fit them against Jackson's career and the trail of tears. See Cabiness v. Herndon, 16 Kentucky Reports 469 (1821).